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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

HN is really good at programming language, IT, and computer science discussions. It really varies once you get outside that bubble.

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.

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HN is not actually good at programming and CS, either.

No large, well-known open discussion venue is really very good at discussing any topic.

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."

Because it is filled with all kinds. Junior devs arguing over some pedantic point, and senior devs trying to explain the forest and the trees. Birds are objects, bees are functions.

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.

And people post short comments that take strong positions in such a way that it's really hard to decide whether it's a complete beginner bluffing or an expert talking from a wealth of experience.

I'm not aware of any better place for people to chat about programming languages including esoteric stuff like APL where someone actively developing the main commercial offering and another writing an open source alternative are actively contributing to the conversation and explaining how low level operations work.

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.

There are a surprising amount of that on various discord servers.

I chat about esoteric languages on the Godot engine discord server once in a while.

Right, but that's very specific, and frankly Discord makes terrible public forums.

HN excels as a general purpose forum for technical discussions relating to computer science.

The quality of actual technical discussion on HN is not much better on average than any programming or technical subreddit in my experience, if they are well moderated. It shouldn't be surprising that the most technically adept people here also tend to post the least often.

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.

HN is just barebones. I don’t think there’s anything about it that specifically makes it better than anything else other than tech articles float to the top.

> There are a surprising amount of that on various discord servers.

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?

Not better, per se, just different. More focused, often more friendly.

I’ll edit this comment with some links when I get back to my pc if I remember

I think the point is the signal to noise ratio is poor. But it's less bad than everywhere else I find.

lambda the ultimate

For convenience: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

so what is better?

That’s just a low effort Reddit trope. Name one place that has better discussion on a broad range of programming topics.

My work Teams channel

Broad means more than just your Scala backend and neo4j db.

HN is not actually good at self deprecating jokes, either

> HN is not actually good at self deprecating jokes, either

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).

This made me laugh haha.

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.

Engineer's Disease: the idea that domain competence translates to anything out of that domain.

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.

Just to be clear, fundamentalist Mormon means he had multiple wives, and most likely lived on a secluded compound or in one of the surrounding areas of one of these compounds. Your likelihood of interacting with such a person is near zero.

Dunning-Kruger sponsors all HN threads about aviation, military strategy, and the education system.

And anything dealing with Psychology or Philosophy.

Everyone is an armchair expert spouting common tropes.

I think there's a corollary to Gell-Mann amnesia where experts subconsciously believe their expertise in one field transfers to other fields. I've certainly caught myself making this mistake, at least.

I remember it being both comforting and disappointing to read Plato and find Socrates noting this same phenomenon. We've made many advancements as a species, but in some areas we're largely unchanged from ancient times.

If he did not write 2nd and 3rd Socrates …

Nitpicking a bit, but Gell-Mann amnesia isn't that. Its about generally trusting newspapers/journalists and then reading an article about a theme you're familiar with. Then you realize that the journalist is full of it and got things completely wrong. By turning the newspapers page you start reading an article about something you're not familiar with. You immediately forget the BS from the page before and continue reading (probably same sort of BS) from another journalist but this time you're again trusting the newspapers as some kind of good source of truth.

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.

>Nitpicking a bit, but Gell-Mann amnesia isn't that.

Hence "corollary to"...

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