The quality of discussion on this website is abysmal.
Sometimes you get a topic on mathematics and a few mathematicians are on there answering questions directly and it's great. In my own field of energy markets and power grid operation, I've noticed the comments have a good mixture of informed folks and those that are way off base. I'm sure it's much worse on some topics and that I'm just as guilty at times :)
Hopefully there are enough experts in an area to drown out the noise.
I'm not sure it's even possible for one to be. As the saying goes, "None of us is as dumb as all of us."
For a thousand niche subjects in CompSi, there are 0-100 levels of knowledge.
The discourse can be great, and can also go off the rails.
I've seen plenty of experts here on stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk (Alan Kay has posted on here), tons on Java, Python, R, C++, Julia...it goes on and on.
I chat about esoteric languages on the Godot engine discord server once in a while.
HN excels as a general purpose forum for technical discussions relating to computer science.
The biggest difference is HN is strongly anti-humor, primarily because of the weird pathology the culture here has about Reddit and appearing "mainstream." But the lack of memes here doesn't make the rest of the content better, rather it tends to result in aggression, knee-jerk contrarianism and overconfident assertions in ignorance becoming low effort virtue signals instead.
I'm never surprised anymore by how much productive discussion is entombed in Discord servers, just sad. Servers are hidden from the public, not web-searchable, barely searchable internally, horrible threading, notification hell, proprietary software, zero data ownership - it could hardly be a worse public discussion forum if it tried. Which makes sense because it was designed to be something else. Sigh... got a link to any of these servers that have better discussion than HN?
I’ll edit this comment with some links when I get back to my pc if I remember
One problem is Hacker News are terrible at recognizing dry humor. 90% of readers interpret tongue-in-cheek posts as face-value. And among those who recognize the humor, 77% want an accompanying "/s" flag iff (day-of-week mod 13 == -2).
I get pushback when I say "If something is too ridiculous, assume it is a joke." Because people are insistent that there are people who really believe dumb shit. They're not wrong, but if they are sincere, why treat them as anything but a joke? It's not like you're going to convincingly correct them when they make such grave errors. So why not a joke? What's the old saying? I'd rather laugh than cry.
I've butchered the explanation, but its described much better here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
PS I've seen this effect many times in my life first hand and its frankly astonishing how much power some journalists wield and some don't even know it.
Hence "corollary to"...
Everyone is an armchair expert spouting common tropes.
Put another way, the most hardline, fundamentalist Mormon I've ever known was a former boss, who was a fantastic engineer -- and completely incapable of challenging his assumptions in any other area. Ruthlessly logical when it came to system design, but couldn't apply that to anything else.
Point is, you have a lot of adaquate STEM types talking out their ass about stuff outside their domain.
Plus a non-trivial amount of marketing and agit-prop bots, which shouldn't come as a surprise to the crowd that was talking about GPT long before it was cool.
Maybe it doesn't always happen, but generally by the time I read a remark like yours, the really poor ones are at the bottom and nice ones are lining up just below it.
It has a side benefit of being a subtle intelligence signal if you're the "what about" person, i.e. "I saw the gap/flaw that OP missed, therefore smarter".
This, I think, is an "I'm smart" feedback loop that promotes more of the same behavior. It's a powerful motivator when you're on sites and boards also populated by ostensibly smart people. No one wants to be the dumb one. So you start to get wrapped up in being the bug finder/doubt-conjurer/"what about"-er.
Enough time goes by with those types being uncorrected and you wind up with comment sections that just turn into TTFC (time to first complaint) races, often by people with no practical experience in a domain save a quick wikipedia search or who don't even read tfa but boy howdy they've sure got some thoughts about that field as a "science" and gosh i can't wait to read them.
Of course this is all just an old man grumbling out a theory on a Tuesday. I'm not sure how to fully solve it and doubt there's a general solution. For myself, I was eventually broken of shitty habits like that through what would probably now be considered bullying. Gotta say though; sometimes it works. Sometimes your brain needs its ass kicked into realizing you're a smart cookie but you're not the smartest, and that's okay.
In my field, Civil Engineering, I get paid mostly to figure out all those things that could go wrong and mitigate or account for them within the budget and constraints available.
Experience is valued in engineering because you can see the probable future on things are likely to break/fail/go wrong, BEFORE they actually do.
It's not surprising to me then that a bunch of engineers who spend all day thinking in this way do the same in different contexts where it may be less appropriate because they are less knowledgeable.
I don't think it's necessarily a way to try to look smart or something.
Bingo! On HN, the "I am very smart" often becomes "I can reason about any unfamiliar ${complex field} from first principles in the time it takes to write a 2-paragraph comment based on only TFA". Such comments elicit confirmation bias from other non-experts and you may have a completely wrong (or not even wrong) comment at the top. It's a frustrating failure-mode of HN.
I'm more of a standing desk one right now.
In my experience, it is because most things are not good enough or are unacceptable. You see this in software engineering, technology, and science. Not in this particular case necessarily, but most "innovations" can be shown to be impractical and not good enough through back of the envelope calculations. Yet, the discourse on the Internet is full of these useless things, including this stupidity I remember back at the height of Covid: https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-lg-unveils-battery-po...
But this also relies on the size of the HN populations. Too many and the noise takes over, making it difficult or even frustrating to participate.
Stick to what you know and plough on.
Recognising non-goals is a core skill for any technical profession. This is a research project doing completely novel things, and specifically mentions some of the intended use-cases. Of course they’re not the least bit concerned with propeller drones.
What's tough is that there's no way to tell who exactly they are. I could be a member of this group for all we know!
Such UAV prototypes have been flying for over a decade.
Years ago, when I read about the original grandiose plans for the Air Force's Y-2, one of the aspects I thought was very interesting was the ability to create a "virtual airfoil"[1] via the Coandă effect. It seemed like one of those designs that was impractical with a human 100% in control, but that might come around again with computer assistance or a fully computer-piloted aircraft. Pretty neat that someone already made it happen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar has a brief discussion of this.
either that, or it's because the internet encourages people to be passive aggressive but polite, which is a new way to fight online.
it's a problem of being in front of a screen for too long, a lot of people always want to be right, and they treat scientific accuracy like it's a religion.
nitpicking is the second worse thing after online trolling
Pedantry
If 90% of people exhibit some characteristics of the autism spectrum, shouldn't we start to consider the people with none as the ones worthy of a label? Like people with true pitch. We give them a label, not people with less than perfect pitch.
Perhaps pedantry is like true pitch or "perfect" vision. It's actually a good thing. Even if it annoys people who don't have it. I wonder if people with true pitch go through life cringing on the inside every time they hear a wrong note. But they learn to never let on that they notice.
Perhaps the part of pedantry that puts a person on the autism spectrum is not so much the noticing as it is the voicing--the seeming inability to control the expression and calling out a correction instead of just letting it slide.
I've heard some people describe the compulsion something along the lines of "I don't think of it that way, I just noticed something they said was incorrect and so I presented them the correct information", often assuming it would be appreciated.
I mean, it's probably good for engineers in the engineering room, but the culture outside of maker's spaces probably won't consider it smashing conversation.
You are simply wrong. This is a well demonstrated reality: We have more myopia than we used to. It probably (as in, initial studies are showing) that it has to do with getting enough sunlight.
Finally, mention any of this and you get a lesson from HN down vote gang bangers. Sometime I feel like the only free-thinking adult in the room.
Furthermore, finance is dead - it's the "hot field" of the 80s / 90s. It has been commoditized and isn't interesting.
I say this as a CFA who also had various useless finance licenses like CFP, Series 7, 63, 6 etc and worked both on the sales / "advisor" (read Fidelity call center out of college, where I liked to point out that we wear suits and make less than garbagemen to coworkers) side of things and real analysis and still chose to go to IT the first chance I got.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/04/business/nancy-pelosis-2023-tr...
> The Unusual Whales report also notes that of 100 stock-trading members of Congress, a third beat the S&P with their portfolios.
> Last year, the average Democrat nabbed returns of 31% – well ahead of the average Republican’s 18%. Unusual Whales notes Democrats are more invested in tech stocks – which surged in 2023 – while Republicans are more exposed to the banking and oil sectors.
In 2022, their return was -19.8%. 2023 saw the market up enormously, and as my link indicates, Dems in Congress have been benefiting from a focus on tech stocks like Nvidia across the board.
1/3 beat the market; that means 2/3 did not. Right?
In a population of random idiots, you'd probably expect a certain amount to beat the market, a certain amount to match it, and a certain amount to flub.
That's very unlikely. This website has not implemented the features that continuously make Reddit worse as time goes by - self-segregated communities and extensive down voting.
You can read for yourselves and see the difference between that and this.
Here's the same post as this on /r/aviation
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/13k43rj/meet_the_...
For every reddit comment there R, you can find a distinct comment here H, such that H is worse than R.
There's just way more informed expertise on Reddit. The big advantage of HN is that some tech luminaries post here. But the overall quality is much lower than the topic-reddits. It's more like an /r/technology.
That is one hell of a claim...
For context.
Since the advent of general language AIs, it is quite &*$%#@ to discuss anything on widely popular web sites.
Some internet usages are going to shift.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you have knowledge about the technology, I hope you will share it. You've posted three-ish comments that share only a tiny amount:
* This comment (and others in this thread), which contributes nothing to the discussion, degrades the dialog generally, and violates site guidelines.
* "Why?"
* A comment that leaps to a negative interpretation of someone else's comment and criticizes them, though also does provide some knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923926
The key is to not post them yourself and to let the good ones shine.
There's a spectrum between Reddit on one end, and the typical IRC channel fiefdom with its mod-permissioned voicing, invisible banhammer tripwires, and admonitions to LuRK MoAR, on the other, and I think HN is in a sweet spot/zone somewhere between those extremes, but perhaps might need an adjustment in the direction of the latter.
Downvoting/flagging somewhat furnishes this signalling, but it's too ambiguous of a signal and is often abused by people who simply want to suppress information that is perfectly valid but not to their liking.
This is where a slashdot type of lightly sentiment-coded moderation system really may be worth bringing back into fashion.
I think it'd be useful to ban pun threads and other low effort shitposting, but it would probably have issues determining actual expertise from faux expertise. With the wrong settings it would be frustratingly useless, but over time some useful defaults should emerge.
Let me give an example for myself. I am not an expert in ML. I come to HN to learn about ML and I feel like I learn a good amount. I try to grok the comments, read the articles, etc. If I stumbled upon a bunch of very, very misguided comments I'd expect or hope that someone would say something so I could save myself some time. I see that kind of behavior a lot when users on HN call out "bad physics" but no one calls out bad aerospace.
I feel like any learning is sort of a bonus.