How and Why I Journal | Hacker News Reader

How and Why I Journal

jan.miksovsky.com

22 pointsOuterVale28 comments

Not sure why, but when I clicked on 'A HN post with negative points – how?' from the HN home page it led to the post we're currently on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663), but I think it should have led here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316

A bug!?

Same

that is normal behavior, clicking on the 'comments' link would lead you here

Same way I got here

Not a bug, the post 'A HN post with negative points – how?' is a link to this post.

But yeah it's a bit confusing for one HN post to take you to another HN post.

not a bug; the post we are currently on is the one that apparently used to be negative.

Responding to the actual content of the post… :P

Starting a long term commitment like journaling isn’t that hard. Just write something. There are a million apps and special notebooks to make it as easy as possible. I often hear people say staring is easy, maintaining is hard. Maintaining is also easy. Journaling doesn’t get harder with time. We often just underestimate how little your future self will care or value the same things current you does. It’s true that life gets in the way or a busy period will knock you out of your new habits. But starting again is still easy. Maintaining a journaling practice for a long time isn’t really that hard, it’s just hard to keep caring.

jup, it's just habits. my journal is a plain text file in vim. no special apps, no reminders, and no rules on what to write. i write what seems significant. what i want to remember. stuff that i may want to look up later. since last year that includes what i spend money on, since a few days it's a todo list of things i want to do today. i track work hours, or even if nothing happened. that matters, because a missing entry more likely means that i forgot to write, not that there was nothing write about.

It was actually such a popular post that the points total overflowed and went negative.

I object to the notion that this person is keeping a family journal with their memories.

Unless they all share in writing and choosing images, it is a personal journal about a family from one members perspective.

Other members of the family would have experienced the recorded events differently and would have chosen different things to record.

(Written as a person that often thinks that different things are interesting and noteworthy.)

-4 points on this submission? What? How did that happen? I've never seen it go negative.

It won't even upvote it to -3. Integer overflow?

This is...a first.

Do a get a biscuit or something for somehow managing this?

Interestingly on the Harmonic client on my Android phone it is claiming -10 points. Very odd.

Hacker News uses the D&D 2e ruleset. You’re doing great… if you want everyone to miss your post.

My theory is either fudging the display (add/remove votes to prevent people from knowing the real count), or there’s a secret API that some bot found and exploited.

Or maybe it uses negative points when it detects bad actors voting/commenting on it? Just spitballing of course.

Ironically, the novelty of a negative point value seems to be the primary driver of traffic to this post.

Looks like we have a race condition that someone triggered by using a script to rapidly upvote and then unvote the submission. I'm not sure whether to be grateful or pissed. Perhaps I'll settle on grateful once I've fixed it.

In the meantime, please don't anybody else do this!

Hm so not only is it possible to manipulate scores on HN with weird scripts, but mods only noticed this when users pointed it out in this instance, with no automation or logging there to detect something like this?

Do you suppose motivated individuals might have used something like this to bury wrongthink at a time when mods insisted such a thing wasn't happening, and even if it was, it was happening to all tribes equally so really it wasn't a big deal?

Long-tail deviation from added random noise?

Seems possible, though I’m surprised there isn’t a check for negative point values. Perhaps something’s been changed on the backend recently, since it seems this hasn’t happened before.

Came for the negative score, stayed to learn about journalling.

I have been here at - 1

well, maybe you found the antidote to society's ills. Journaling.

Writing stuff down helps me remember the good times and that the bad times don't last. It shows growth, from the way I write to the way I think. And it's humbling to see my ideas strewn about a piece of paper and realize, they're not as good as I think they are.

So, maybe the tech overlords "hate this one trick". ha.

I do wonder if more people started journaling if the world would become a better place. not a scientist, so I don't know how you'd even prove that. but, anecdotally, journaling is just as effective as therapy for me.

"What an embarrassing website! It has just about run its course, hasn't it?"

Just posting to be part of this historical record.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com