Hacker News Reader

Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

> Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... literal-minded Hacker News commenters will understand what I mean, but let's start there.

Just don't ever use a metaphor on Hacker News. People will always misinterpret it

View on HN

People don't think about sports or boxing etc in the context of talking about laptops, and some people here speak English as a second or third or more language.

But no, let's be snarky about HN peeps being literal and misinterpreting things.

I agree, let’s do that. Thanks for saying it

> Just don't ever use a metaphor on Hacker News. People will always misinterpret it

I've always wondered why that is. No other community I'm active in insists so much on explicitly spelling out everything and very literal language – most will actually reward playing with language, if done well. Writing as if targeting Commander Data seems to work quite well though.

This might come off as projection, but in my experience, HN has a lot of people who pride themselves on their rationality, and part of this is giving off the image of never joking and always being serious. You can see this when people get mass downvoted for making jokes, which is also uncommon in other programming communities. Somehow this often spills over into metaphors as well as jokes. I think that jokes and metaphors are quite similar in that regard, both not to be taken totally seriously and/or literally. The HN insistence of being above jokes inevitably leads to being above metaphors.

Tech is known for being international, and even in the US is staffed with a lot of foreign-born labour. I don't find it surprising that a community with a high amount of non-native speakers sometimes misinterprets metaphors.

It's just not a good metaphor in this case, where weight is an actual determining factor. In boxing, weight class is literally your weight, saying nothing of your power.

League or class would have probably been better here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com