How to Participate in Hacker News
edweissman.com
edweissman.com
A lot of long-time HN'ers are frustrated at the "flag patrols" -- people of one group who don't like such-and-such author and flag them and their submissions. I've heard several people complain to me about having normal articles flagged and I've done my share of complaining. Don't be the guy who takes out your personal grudges in the form of flagging. Let the votes work.
The system will not work with punitive flagging. My policy is that I flag only when I'm convinced an article is going to take the board off the rails. That's a tough call anymore. With a large enough audience, people get emotional just about anything.
But remember that HackerNews is defined the most by what the people don't do. They don't comment if they don't have something interesting to say, they don't flag unless absolutely necessary, they don't criticize unless it's in the spirit of discovery, they don't vote down unless it's really a trivial comment. Do less and you'll enjoy it more. With the crowd as large as it is, I'm starting to see good comment X which has ten sub-comments, nine of which either didn't understand the main comment or don't understand the issue yet want to score karma points by making somewhat snarky remarks. We all need to fight that tendency. We do that by doing less.
There is a great deal of "secret sauce" running on HN, and to prevent adversaries from abusing HN for their own gain, PG deliberately does not publicly divulge how a lot of things work. [1] You would need to have either a deep fascination with discussion forums, or far too much free time (probably both) to figure out some of the non-public details of how HN really works. If one really does their homework well and figures out some of the details, hopefully they have enough respect for PG, YC and all of the folks using HN to not abuse or divulge what they learn.
Though the precise details are not public information, pg has publicly stated that he does have some form of (vote/flag) "ring detection" running here on HN to thwart group and/or multi-account manipulation. [2] Since the details are not public, there is really no way to know how effective the ring detection is, but suffice to say, if it wasn't an improvement, it wouldn't exist.
When it comes to flagging and up-voting of submissions, the publicly described logic is both clever and fascinating. If you flag heavily up-voted submissions, your flags count less. Similarly, if you flag too many things (and most likely, too quickly), your flags count less. In other words, there are thresholds employed. [3,4]
When it comes to flagging comments, I can't recall seeing any mention of how the comment flags are handled, and worse, there's nothing in my notes about it. Considering the potential for abuse, I doubt PG will ever give vague details about it. Spam comments are an interesting problem, and it's very difficult to solve. Allowing users to flag comments is one way to handle it, but divulging the details would most likely reduce the effectiveness of the counter-measures.
There is still one place on HN where doing a lot of flagging and up-voting of submissions is both useful and beneficial to HN as a whole, namely, on the "new" page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
I'm sure many people appreciate the high signal to noise ratio here on HN, and would rather avoid the more noisy /newest page. None the less, people putting in some time to both flag spam and give up-votes to new submissions is what keeps the high signal to noise on the front page.
Yes, even if you're just flagging spam on the /newest page, you can still trigger the "excessive flagger" threshold, and the result is (was?) the "flag" links disappear. I had it happen to me once a long time ago, but since then, I believe the system was changed to simply not count the flags once a user has passed the threshold value. I would bet a human being (pg or a moderator) looks at any account that flags too much to determine if the account should be banned, hell banned, deleted, or whatever. If they see that you're really just trying to flag the endless spam submissions, they probably just quietly appreciate your efforts. I've never received a gilded thank you note for flagging spam submissions, and I don't expect to get one, but I'm sure everyone who likes the high signal to noise ratio around here appreciates it.
NOTE: Though the references below are from PG himself, it's entirely possible that he's changed his mind, and his code, since they were originally posted.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830838
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354900
I'm attempting to view this positively: my goal is to learn how to communicate effectively here, and clearly I'm doing something wrong. It would genuinely help if I knew what that was.
Even if you're a long time user with substantial karma and "show dead" enabled in your profile, there are times when you're still unable to see posts from some "hellbanned" users. With this said, even if I knew which SOPA thread you're talking about, and what user-name you were using, I might not be able to see said problematic posts. You are essentially asking me for blind speculation.
The best I can tell you from blind speculation is you probably let your emotions get the better of you in the discussion, others decided you were acting like an ass, and they flagged your comments. Since you admit to "feeling strongly" about the topic, you were most likely pushing your opinion, and hence, your agenda... --And others pushed back. The other thing to realize is, in highly political and divisive topics there are most likely groups/rings at work trying to suppress the most vocal (or acerbic) posters. As far as I know, there is no such thing as "perfect" ring detection since differentiating it from group-think would be very problematic. If you've read any of PG's code, or any of his coding books (OnLisp, ANSI Common Lisp), you'll agree he's pretty darn good at coding, but even for him, "perfect" ring detection is probably beyond feasible.
So, with blind speculation, you've got three possibilities:
1.) You added a bit too much spice to your comments.
2.) You were on the wrong side of a voting/flagging ring.
3.) You were on the wrong side of consensus / group-think (i.e. you have an uncommon and contentious opinion).
Just because you could see up-votes on your comments does not mean you can see the 'flags' they have received, so you're basing your evaluation on incomplete information.
The last possibility is clearly stated in the HN Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
Sure, SOPA intersects with tech and hacking, and even PG himself got in on the action by taking a stand on it, but none the less, it's still politics. You pushed heavily on comparisons to Nazi Germany (see "Godwin's Law") and voiced strong advocacy of Ron Paul. You might want to note that one rather prolific HN poster described Ron Paul as a "Mendacious Kook," so your opinion is not universally accepted and promoting your opinion is essentially pushing a political agenda. The result, of course, is the same "Ron Paul Spam" problems seen on Reddit. This is not Reddit. Here on HN, there is no way to compartmentalize topics (i.e. "sub-reddits") to prevent political pressure over-load.
You may have been up-voted by those who share your political views, but you were also most likely flagged for voicing those views here. If you want to discuss general politics, HN is the wrong place to do it.
My hunch is that you've been banned twice for going political in a place were it's clearly against the guidelines.
And no, just because you see PG occasionally breaking his own guidelines does not give you, or anyone, license to turn this place into yet another political forum. Hacker (nee Startup) News is his party, and the rest of us are just guests here.
On the bright side, if you study both the NEWS.YC source code and posts made by PG regarding his modifications to the HN version, you'll notice he has a rather consistent habit of using time as a factor in a lot of his calculations. If you got yourself banned for some reason, the ban may or may not be permanent. I suggest that you give your old account another try in a couple of weeks. Though I'm too tired to dig up a reference for you, I do remember reading something about bans being time limited in much the same way that there's a timer to prevent/slow-down replies for the sake of preventing flame wars. I could be mistaken, but none the less, I'm remembering something about this.
Looking at your posts under the 'ldar15' account shows none of them currently marked as '[dead]' so it seems as if your ban timed-out. I don't have total recall, so until someone posts a link to a post by PG stating that not all bans are permanent, the only safe bet is to consider your un-banning as just a coincidence. ;)
For notes, there has been one, and only one, time when I was actually concerned about a down-vote I received. I was interacting directly with PG, and quickly got down-voted. Since my reply to him would show up in his "Threads" page, and the down-vote occurred so quickly, I was unnecessarily concerned the down-vote came from PG --the guy nice enough to provide this site to me any everyone else. In that case, I just sent PG a polite email to make sure I hadn't stepped on any toes. It wasn't him, and it wasn't a big deal to him, but contacting him privately was the most polite way I could think of handling it.
Lastly, there is a known degree of randomness in voting, and there are known problems with up/down link placement on some devices (particularly mobile devices with touch screens). Though I have had moments where I wondered, "Why (the expletive) am I being down-voted?" often, it's not as big of a deal as it seems. Sometimes I communicate poorly. Sometimes I fail to be perfectly clear. Sometimes I get things wrong. Sometimes I'm a bit too spicy in my replies. But sometimes, people just click the wrong button by mistake. It happens to everyone. Learning from mistakes is good, but being overly concerned about it is a waste of time.
You know, the only site that had moderation pretty much figured out (meaning: signal to noise ratio is much better than rest of internet) for over a decade was Slashdot.
Making the system both resilient to attack as well as usable for it's intended function is not straightforward or easy. Hey, I hear that Malda is looking for work... I'd hire someone like him or a Wikipedia veteran.
And if you happen to come across an interesting article about hacking or startups, vote it up -- it might even make it to the front page.
This means that a very few people could prevent huge chunks of legitimate stories from being seen by fellow HNers by flagging.
Flagging, for whatever reason, is much more powerful than voting. If you flag, you not only note that the article is bad, you prevent others from having a choice. That's why it should be used sparingly. If everybody flagged 10 articles a day, it's not that lots of bad articles would get sorted out, it's that nothing new would appear on the front page at all.
Voting means "I don't like it" Flagging means "I decide nobody else should look at it" It's a completely different thing.
Also appropriate material for HN is material of interest to hackers, not just hacking or startups. If you're flagging it because it's not hacking or startups, you're actively preventing the rest of us from seeing material that might be considered pretty good if we had a chance to rate it.
You probably already know all of that. Just wanted to point it out for those who didn't.
As I understand it, this is not the case. If enough people flag a story before it gets some upvotes, then it gets auto-killed, but one flag won't kill a story. It does make it harder to get to the front page though.
> Flagging it later on causes it to sink rapidly off the top page.
This is exactly how I'd expect a downvote to function, so I'd say flagging is serving a sort of dual purpose.
If you look at the front page, there's no lack of quality stories. It's harder these days for any individual story to make it to the front page, but that's a function of greater submission volume.
Quality discussions on the other hand have become more sparse as HN has grown. Perhaps it's a function of community size and there's no real fix for it.
I believe there is a time-limit on how long you have the ability to 'unflag' something. I believe the time limit is similar to being able to edit or delete your comments for a 2 hour period after you made them.
I've heard several people complain to me about having
normal articles flagged
Does the OP of an article get notified?
Depending on how old the article is, the flag can either drop it by hundreds of places, or at least 10 places for a couple of flags. I have done some testing (a while ago), and found that having 2 people flag one of my articles when it had 40/50 points dropped it by 10 places in the next 5 minutes. Unflagging it restored the original position.
Newer articles with fewer points get a much more dramatic effect, however, as far as I can tell.
In my interface, I don't have a down arrow next to the article or comment. But, there is a flag option. When people talk about downvoting, are they referring to flag? Or, something else that I don't have in my interface?
You won't ever get a downvote option for the article. You will eventually be able to downvote other people's comments - unless they are replying directly to you like I am now (this stops pointless bickering via votes).
Flags are designed to note off-topic / incindiery submissions - saying 'this shouldn't be here' rather than 'I don't like this', and should be used sparingly given the extra power they represent.
Curious, if pg is reading this, how often does the flag link generate real actions on submissions?
I especially agree with the original article's point about talking about your work. If you are doing something interesting, please share it. I'm always keen to read about amazing hacks and unique projects and I'm sure many others are too. I'm very slow at writing up my own projects, so I probably should spend more time doing that.
If you are working on something that feels like reinventing a wheel for a company that has a core philosophy of Not Invented Here, share that too. I'm sure many of us have been there once and could give you some advice on ways to improve your situation (even reinventing wheels can be done to a high standard and be great practice coding), empathetic support or perhaps a way out into another job.
I implore you, dear lurking readers, participate.
Edit: fixed some pre-coffee writing.
My way of giving back to the community happens more in real life (aka meatspace, though I hate that term),more recently it's the connections I've made through HN and iOS meetups here in Tokyo that are the most valuable to me. I'm genuinely interested in what people are working on and people seem to find my work situation a lot more interesting than I had thought they would (I actually thought that when I introduced myself at my first HN meetup everyone would groan "Oh not another iOS dev").
Anyway my 2 cents for the year.
Thanks!
-Some of the guys work for big companies and others in little startups doing contract work on the side.
-I don't know anyone serious about iOS development that hasn't invested 100% in learning obj-c.
-I haven't noticed any popular frameworks mentioned.
As for how popular iOS development is I'm not sure, probably less popular than Android (Android handsets are really common). If you are asking in terms of work possibilities, I get offered at least one or two jobs every HN meetup I attend.
1. Time. A discussion typically only lasts one day, and after that its mostly silent. Alongside my job, I simply can't find enough spare "thinking-time" to really write a thoughtful comment in that time frame. I feel that my comments would be more of a knee-jerk reaction than a real addition of value.
2. Language. My mother tongue ist german, not english. While I've been told that my english is quite reasonable, I still feel insecure in it, especially when I read incredibly well-spoken comments. And I do regularly make some mistakes, especially in grammar, and I don't like making mistakes in public (I guess nobody does). And of course, it takes longer to write a comment - see #1...
(I notice not wanting to make mistakes is a very apparent German characteristic, also visible in the Italians)
Even if they seem mundane or pointlessly obscure. Not only is writing a fantastically important skill to level up, and the very act of writing about them will help your thinking, but the buzz and help you can get from the community can spur you on further.
And now I need to go practice what I preach ...
"3. Be positive.
"This can really be hard when smart people debate, but try it anyway. Notice the difference between:
"Person A: Water is dry.
"Person B: No it's not. You're full of shit.
"and
"Person C: Water is dry.
"Person D: Not in my experience. What data have you encountered to cause you to arrive at that conclusion?"
I really like those "what data have you encountered" questions. In a lot of threads, I silently upvote replies that ask people making striking, unusual, bold, or implausible claims to please provide more information. (Too many of those helpful questions, alas, never get answers. But I'll keep on upvoting follow-up questions looking for facts when I see them.)
The author finishes his list of good suggestions with
"10. No list is ever exhaustive, on Hacker News or anywhere else. Anyone have any more suggestions?"
I'd be delighted to hear other suggestions about constructive participation on Hacker News too.
11. Watch your style, capitalize, proofread.
12. Avoid inside jokes, mannerisms, memes. Write for everyone, your readers may include people with very different background.
But seriously, are there any other awesome news aggregates that I should be aware of?
1) When a major event occurs that isn't directly related to technology, don't post comments to the effect "I thought this was hacker news, not reddit". This will ALWAYS get you downvoted and nothing good will come of the discussion.
2) When someone makes a detailed post that you don't agree with, don't down vote it, respond.
3) This is just me speaking for myself, but the only comments I really find useful and thought provoking are the ones that expound on or contradict the original story with your own personal experiences.
4) Nobody here cares if you don't like the font or styling used in the article. Likewise if the page doesn't work in chromefox version2079. Email the owner of the article. Besides, you are a nerd, you already have 4 other browsers installed and know how to use readability.
5) don't be afraid to post funny or terse insightful comments, but make sure they are funny or insightful first.
Without reference, I say I see a lot that the authors respond and update the original article based on HN comments.
edit: I was kidding.
Be respectful, but if you disagree, just disagree. Don't patronize.
But when I'm dealing with non-techies, I see a use to preface any opinion or question with some sort of disclaimer of that sort. I do this in order to lessen the probability that they take offence to what I say and then become uncommunicative. On more than one occasion, I thought we were having a productive conversation about their problems with the software and I find out (when they inexplicably become angry) that they thought I was insinuating their incompetence or lack of intelligence or something.
I think the terse, abrupt style that I and many other techies prefer, comes across as needlessly insensitive to non-techies and we need to be mindful of that if we want to allow them to contribute to this community. (We do like teachers, accountants and shopkeepers commenting on startups in education, finance and retail, right?)
Not to the extent of prefacing everything with patronizing verbiage, but to be mindful not to be too abrupt. Because many people take that as being disrespectful (in my understanding).
Neither does it help that computers can be especially complicated and finicky (looking at you windows).
However, I've concluded that on the Internet there is no such thing as a good discussion (oh no, a universal statement! Well, let's say there aren't very many good discussions). Perhaps this is due to the vast amount of research material easily accessible to online debaters -- there is no incentive to work together with another individual to come to a conclusion, since the conclusions can be more easily found elsewhere.
Instead, people write things like my diatribe here to "correct" perceived mistakes in others' statements but in the end someone is right and the other is wrong and compromise basically never occurs.
In such a situation, the best thing you can do is make sure that you're the person who is right. Whether you couch your opinion in pandering terms or you state it harshly, the only thing that seems to matter is correctness. It's no longer worth my time to continually attempt to be polite and kind in internet discussion.
tl;dr you're right about that.
That would remind people of the true nature of their words and help them remember that the commenter is just stating what he thinks is right and not an attack against the reader's personal state of world. That where I think all useless arguments start from. There's a difference in reading "Water is dry" vs "I think that water is dry". I try to implicitly "hear" that prefix myself each time I'm listening to someone talking.
I created this new account just to gripe about this and when this cookie finally dies I'm not sure I'm going to bother to re-register.
2. Participate!
9a. Use downvotes sparingly.
> when I don't it's usually for a simple reason:
> downvotes sting
I do sometimes check back which comments were voted up (or down) for the sake of curiosity. I then wonder what was it that made one of my comments get many times more points than my average, but often it must simply be that I happened to comment early. I don't really care that much where my karma is going, it's more like a reflection of the community than a reflection of me.
Just wanted to emphasize this as it seems to confuse a lot of people.
On the other hand, in forums where people upvote humour, there can be mechanisms that actually are counterproductive. E.g. on Reddit where there is something serious that you are interested in, but some idiot starts a punning thread which takes off and runs for pages. Or slashdot, where a witty one line (simplistic) put down off a complex issue will recieve maximum karma, whereas a well thought out retort will struggle to break the readability threshold.
Hacker News has a number of mechanisms for impeding flame-wars, and I think some of them also impede the flow of humour. No fast replies for instance slows things down, and also the depth algorithm because PG doesn't like deep threads. Another one is de-emphasising karma. If people hand out karma for being entertained, then the system 'rewards' you for being entertaining, so again people go for the slashdot style one-off witty put down.
On the gripping hand, now that HN de-emphsises karma (and has weird rules about what can and cannot be down-voted), I'm much less likely to actually bother. Karma is already pointless, but rubbing our faces in it simply reduces participation. The ideal system would 'reward' well thought out replies, and I don't see the current system doing that anytime soon.
On the invisible hand humour is an important part of geek culture, as are references to things such as invisible hands and gripping hands. I'm not sure why that is, but word-play and recursion (important parts of being a really clever programmer) are already pretty close to humour, or possibly even forming some of the foundations of it.
Which leads me to conjecture that all of the really good programmers have a healthy sense of humour, and that implies that if hacker news is overrun with people who don't have a good sense of humour, that would indicate the ratio of good programmers here is falling. Why would that be? Perhaps because of the emphasis on money, and winning the startup lottery. The programmers who are only in it for the money tend to view themselves as more 'serious' - so I suspect they are the source of the "humourless git" demographic.
But I wanted to respond to this: now that HN de-emphsises karma
I don't think it de-emphasises karma much at all. On every single page of HN you view, your karma is there in high-contrast lettering right next to your handle. It's also not quite pointless as there are several features that get unlocked by high karma. I'd love to see the user's karma score banished from everywhere but their profile page. I don't want to be reminded that I have a score on every page visit.
On the humour thing, it's not that I don't see humour on the site, it's that the same humour can be punished or rewarded depending on the alignment of the planets or whatever.
I just don't think we need to encourage content-free comments here; there are plenty of places to go if you want to make fun of the news.
Then again, I moderate a site that's been accused of taking too hard a line on "fun", so maybe I shouldn't talk.
But in terms of humor I think it's fairly straightforward: don't do it unless you think of something that's really fucking funny (and hopefully a little insightful). If it's funny enough you will get upvoted just by sheer force of charisma. If it's just marginally funny you will likely get buried, and I think that's a good thing, because a lot of people aren't as funny as they think they are, and you don't need to look beyond Reddit to see what a culture of one-liners does to a discussion forum. If it's just some simple pun then likely many of the readers already thought of it and don't particularly want to read it over and over again.
If it's just funny, and not elucidating, gentle humour that does not rely on the sudden glory of the reader often gets upvoted.
In all seriousness, humor on HN needs to be:
1) Actually funny; it can't an obvious pun or cliché.
2) Constructive; humor *can* convey and add to meaning.
3) Clean and nice; this should go without saying.- Discussions are almost always value add. Even if you adamantly oppose someone else's position. Gaining perspective is a huge value add for me personally.
Related side note, I was contacted today by who I can only guess was the same person, asking how to participate on HN. I sent them an email but didn't hear back. I suppose I can assume they were busy contacting a large set of users. Not that there's any harm in that. I hope they find this list instructive!
As a long-time lurker, I mainly visit HN to get exposed to new ideas that I know little about. This is why I don't (and shouldn't) comment very often.
12. Write your own good stuff and submit that. Got a long response? Write a blog, submit it.
Those two have worked the best for me.
> And most of all, please never start a sentence with, "It seems to me...". Many of us already get too much of that from our PHBs.
Could you expand on this please? I've always interpreted "It seems to me..." as "I have a theory but I'm not certain".
Well, sometimes the article is better than the discussion. Sometimes the discussion is better than the article. In my experience, the trivial articles sometimes have the best discussions, and the best articles seem to often have trivial discussions.
It'd be fun to get a list of best HN discussions (highest karma average per comment perhaps) ... anyone know how to do that?
The now-discontinued SearchYC database had top lists but not the particular metric you want. It doesn't show up in the Google cache or archive.org's Wayback Machine (http://top.searchyc.com)
In my opinion, I think some of the best HN discussions have been/are the ones with hundreds of comments, with divergent threads and replies. They are usually sparked by a fairly controversial topic.
I can't think of an example right now. However, this API to the HN corpus might be able to get you the data you want (not sure how current it is):
2.)The best way to participate is to go out and do something awesome. Take something you saw on the front page and mess around with it. Maybe something will happen and you make the front page. Probably it won't, but the next time it comes up, you can at least share your experience and point out the basic pitfalls. Example: I am working on extending emscripten to use dragonegg to compile fortran. It's really hard and I don't think I can do it, but next time emscripten comes up, I will know what's up and can comment on how awesome Alon is.
3.)My password for my account is zackzackzack. Yep, same as my user name. It lets me keep from getting attached to an argument or an account. If somebody can just go in and change my password, then it is pointless to really care all that much. I like contributing, but I know at any instance all the karma I built up on here could be sealed away.
Edit: fortran to javascript. Google emscripten github for more info.
Because your full name, personal domain (which includes your last name), college, and interests are all part of your profile, it would be fairly trivial to post some pretty embarrassing comments or links as you. Then if someone (potential employer/girlfriend/family member/etc) does a google search for Zachary Maril, and a bunch of links to racist or pornographic sites come up... "my password is public" is a pretty lousy excuse.
At some point people are going to do bad things to this profile. No doubt. With that in mind though, I can post here because I want to say something and contribute, not because of Karma. If I had a few thousand points and a reputation, I would have something to protect. But now I can just say what I think is useful, not what I think will be upvoted.
I don't care if you're from Seattle or India, or if you're a young guy or an old lady; I care that you're the same person who posted that real interesting post three months ago about certain subject, or with whom I've had some interesting discussion about this or that, and who has a certain opinion about a controversial topic. I don't know if a certain post with your handle comes from the person I know is smart and probably knows what (s)he's talking about, or from some troll.
If I can never be sure if you're the same person, then trust can't be established; it's not about karma as "points," it's about karma as a property of human relations.
It's the same reason why I (almost) never respond to Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot - I'm never sure if the person who replies to me next is the same I was talking to.
As an aside, I was not the person I was three months ago. Neither was anybody else on here. Part of my world view is that nobody is ever the same person as I remember them as.
Rationale:
a.) my impression of a person on the internet is inherently imperfect.
The internet is an autistic medium and can't really describe the complexity of a person. Maybe he is a "dummy" but happened to know one thing really really well and was having an awesome day mentally when he posted that comment. Or perhaps he was a putnam winner who was hangover and just broken up with a long term girlfriend when he made that really douchey comment. I just can't know this things and won't pretend to know them.
b.) people change.
What if my comment about not knowing anything about Python 12 months ago spurred me to go out and master the language last year? If you compared a persons comments at the very beginning of reading hacker news and then a year later, I expect you will see a massive shift in their writing style. People change and aren't the people they were the last time I interacted with them. How could I trust anyone on here (or in real life), if I know I can never be sure they are the same person they were the last time we interacted? It's a hard question that I haven't really found a good answer for yet.
If I had a facebook, I would never do this sort of thing there. That would really really suck.
And somebody could already pose as me, or you, or anybody else on here who isn't way famous (nobody could pose as pg). Anybody can be anybody else on the internet.
In this case I can see why some people downvoted you. But otherwise, downvoting should be reserved for spam/malice and not for a differing opinion, not even for one that you totally disagree with.
Yes, I've built up a 4000+ karma not because I some day want to be in YC, but because I like to participate in this community.
Its very common to be downvoted or insulted because of that, im trying to get pass that problem right now
You shouldn't hold back your participation due to insecurities on your spelling or grammar. In my experience the only downvoted posts belong in the categories of; stupid, messaged which consist only of 'haha' or 'this'; Completely offtopic; Insulting or offensive; Incorrect.'
In this post I've probably used semi-colons incorrectly, this doesn't I will be downvoted because of it.
It's like the bad old days of trying to use the Eclipse IDE where most of your screen real estate is taken up with tabs and buttons and you only get a narrow 5x80 window on the world.
Except that in this case instead of the screen being taken up with masses of widgets, it is consumed with vast tracts of whitespace. Good job there, PG.
(Actually, if PG had anything to do with it, I suspect it is a well thought out policy which results because he doesn't like long conversations (possibly a signal to noise bias against long posts?) consider also that there is no easy way to quote the parent, which just wastes bandwidth anyway)
People are much more likely, for whatever reason, to dismiss mistakes when the possibility of such is explicitly acknowledged by the author.
If the answer is yes, go ahead and read the suggestion along with the guidelines of how to act.
If the answer is no, stop reading the suggestion after the first point: "Be yourself."
I'll still probably lurk more as I get used to the community. It's great to say "participate!" but there is something to be said for understanding the people with which one is talking as well.
There's really nothing to say about software patents at this point that hasn't been said many times before.
In some ways this is an extension to the guideline of not introducing flamewar topics, but even less interesting as pretty much everyone agrees.
Some journalist on CNet took my comment as the official company line and included it in an article. It was picked up by investors (during what was in retrospect due diligence before the company was sold) and I got a severe reprimand from my manager for it. He let me know under no uncertain terms that were it not for my excellent work up till then he'd have fired me for that. I was never really forgiven, made to feel uncomfortable and left 6 months later when the company was sold.
Now I don't exactly hide my real name, but its not easily visible. And I certainly don't disclose the company I work for. I advise any non-C level employee to do the same.
Often someone will ask you a question, and unless you check you will never know.