Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xichekolas | Hacker News Reader

Giles is still angry that his post "Muppets" got downmodded a lot. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172894)

I thought his criticism was valid though. (Not that he cares one bit! ;) ... Both those articles started off assuming that PHP 'won' something, and then tried to explain why by pointing out good things about PHP and its community. Neither of them started by laying down the contest rules, examining all the contenders, and picking a winner... They started with a winner and worked backwards somehow into the aether.

On the other hand, if you just realize headlines are by definition linkbait, you can make the mental substitution of the phrase "became more popular than any other toy language" for the word "won". Suddenly those articles make more sense, even if they become less controversial (or insightful) in the process.

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from talking to Giles (I work with him), I think his problem with hacker news is that it's basically turning into another digg/reddit/slashdot type of thing. It's basically a pool of links outlining what's popular with whoever the users of the site are at the moment, and that group of people is likely to change over time.

I think what would work better is a pool of links that shows you stuff you might find interesting based on past usage (voting up/down, friending others, etc). Don't show me what's interesting to everybody who reads the site, show me what's interesting to _me_. As Giles has said in the past, I have a need for better filtering mechanisms.

There is a fundamental conflict of interests in asking for new information from a diverse cross section of people (aka the web) while also wanting to only see those things with which you already agree.

If your purpose is knowledge or worldly depth/breadth, there is probably greater value in doing exactly the opposite. You know best those things which you already like.. so exposure to those ideas you don't already like would provide the greatest bang for the cognitive buck.

If anything, we need less filters. (imo)

right, i'll go ahead and remove digg and reddit from my /etc/hosts blackhole then

I see your point. I don't know the answer but I am wary of group-thinking ourselves into cranky single mindedness.

But reddit, digg, and HN are all sources of group-think, not really diversity.

Of the 3, HN is the only one that really welcome true contrariness SOMETIMES, but I've still been downmodded for pointing out biases and groupthink here.

And I'm not even an asshole about it.

They always crucify the heretics. It's an group instinct that thwarts leadership and completely counter to the theoretical intention of HN. This should be a tribe of heretics.

Ah. I come here mostly for the discussion. It's honestly quite rare that the actual link is that interesting to me. In fact, the commentary here is probably the only thing that really differentiates it from Reddit/Digg.

But if he wants content personalized, Stumbleupon might be a good avenue.

I come here mostly for the discussion. It's honestly quite rare that the actual link is that interesting to me.

I've been finding exactly the same thing, actually. Usually when I upvote it's because the discussion is interesting, rather than the article.

I don't really have a problem with that though; reddit et al can provide links in topics of immediate interest, but the community still differentiates HN IMO.

Actually, since you mention Stumbleupon... They have a feature where you can do friends-only stumbling, where a "friend" is someone you have subscribed too. Maybe a bunch of us could make accounts specifically for hacker related stuff, and then subscribe to one another.

Edit: I just created http://jessealdridge.stumbleupon.com/ if anyone is interested in doing this.

Hacker News is still different to Digg and Reddit because those sites have a sense of humor.

Your made a really good point. I like HN, but the selection of headlines in the front page is mostly irrelevant to me. It just tells me the topics that people are discussing, but they are usually of less interest in my point of view.

I find many more interesting things by just scanning the "new" section. It would be nice if there was some way to have a front page with just the news that I like.

What makes HN valuable (to me at least) is a higher-grade pool of tech-savvy commenters - folks who'll bring new perspectives to a problem/issue being discussed. ...and not filling up the pages with "comments" like >>Awesome post!

From reading gilles' take on hacker news and the fact that he thinks that one of the problem is that people who waste more time vote more (because they are wasting their time reading everything on here), I wonder if limiting the number of votes to 3-5 a day would be a good move? People who come here a bit only would have proportionally more power than before...

But a system that recommended links from past usage would be interesting (and a fun challenge to do well)

Slashdot already does something like that - rationing mod points. OTOH, slashdot also disproves his idea that social news (if slashdot can be called that) declines as a function of time. Today's slashdotters are a lot smarter than Diggers or redditors.

One of the constants of News.YC is people worrying it's turning into d/r/s. As far as I can tell the site is about the same as it always was. (If anyone wants to check, item ids are sequential.) But I did wonder when I saw his title whether it was a contemptuous test to see if standards here had fallen so low that he could get to number 1 simply by baiting News.YC by name.

unfortunately it wasn't a test, there was no if. I knew it would work. see the link at the bottom of my post, to the summon monsters post, explaining the inevitable signal/noise decline. the tactic will become more effective as time goes on, and PHP dominating the top stories told me the decline had progressed. (I had returned to the site after a prolonged hiatus.)

it's not contemptuous, although it may seem contemptible. I just did the math, knew the tactic would become infallible over time, and used it when signs indicated it would succeed.

of course this implicitly challenges your statement that the site's the same as it ever was. I actually don't have any proof to back that up. I think it would actually be reallllllllllllllllly hard to quantify. I could say there's a frog in boiling water effect there, but then there's the possibility that HN aka News.YC simply had a bad day yesterday, and if I had chosen another day for my random return, I could have come away with the impression it was improving.

unfortunately it wasn't a test, there was no if. I knew it would work.

Ah, the classic claim that there was never any doubt of success. Always works best after the fact.

Nota bene: You may think what I'm about to write has something to do with your last name, but I'm not that funny.

HN is very predictable, in some ways. It's not predictable with 100% accuracy like digg or reddit.

But, still, HN people have a group identity to a large degree. And if you attack that group identity, the group is interested in the attack and they are ready to circle the wagons.

Both interest and wagon-circling in this context mean upvoting so other people see it.

Hasn't just about everything Giles' written about HN come up on the front page?

I just knew you were going to say that!

heh. got me

Mostly HN has just gotten bigger. This means that bad comments and bad posts happen more often than they used to. But good discussion also happens more often than ever.

OT, but the boiling frog myth is just that: a myth. http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp

It's an incredibly useful metaphor, though.

No it's not. Snopes just doesn't know how to do a literature search for anything that hasn't been written in English and more recently than 1997.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Hr0aAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA300&#...

Thank for pointing that out. From your Google Books links:

How great the just perceptible change can be made to become by making the rate of change extremely slow is a matter that still remains for investigation. It is worthy of note that it has been found possible in 5.25 hours to crush a frog's foot, without a sign that the pressure was felt, by screwing down a button at the rate of 0.03 mm per minute. A similar experiment showed that a live frog can actually be boiled without a movement if the water is heated slowly enough; in one experiment the temperature was raised at the rate of 0.002 Celsius per second, and the frog was found dead at the end of 2.5 hours without having moved.(1) If a frog can be crushed or boiled without any evidence that he has noticed it, it is at least an interesting question of what can be accomplished in this direction with human beings.

(1) The literature on these experiments with frogs includes Heinzmann, Euber die Wirkung sehr allmaliger Aenderungen thermischer Reize auf die Empfindungsnerven, "Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol." (Pfluger), 1872, vi. 222. Fratscher, Euber continuirliche und langsame Nervenreizung, "Jenaische Zeitschrift," 1875, N. F. ii. 130. Sedgwick, On the Variation of Reflex Excitability in the Frog induced by changes of Temperature, "Stud. Biol. Lab., Johns Hopkins Univ.," 1882, 385.

Does this mean the content of your post is a joke? Can someone just delete the link and we can move on.

There was enough of interest in the post - about the inherent brokenness of social news - to make it worth upvoting without paying attention to the "HN sucks."

That Garfield submission on the front page, OTOH...

Meh, I thought that was the point. I enjoy this forum because others cull through a mass of information to find interesting things. I don't always know what I will find interesting so I choose a group to guide.

hey Matt so I'm actually writing this while telling you in Campfire that you're right. so there's not much point except that I figured a little "yep" would be useful for the discussion. and as you know I have a very specific solution in mind but we won't go there. ^_^

regarding the whole discussion vs. linkroll thing, I have to say the quality of the discussion is one place where Hacker News still really shines. I have no theory to explain that atm.

> headlines are by definition linkbait

pg would prefer that not to be the case, and actually frequently edits headlines to "blunt" them.

If true: very interesting...

Vote for my new version control suggestion :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439050

>>Giles is still angry that his post "Muppets" got downmodded a lot

hahaha. dude even after I clicked that I had no idea what you were talking about. however, I had to turn off a Greasemonkey script to even find the comments here. I have it set up to automatically block me from seeing whether my posts are on HN or not. if I see them, I read the comments, and get pissed off. so not I'm not still angry but yeah I did get quite mad at the time, whatever it was about.

Amusingly, since I linked to that old comment of yours, you have gotten 6 net upvotes on it.

What GM script are you using?

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