The monster inside my son | Hacker News Reader

The monster inside my son

salon.com

47 pointsrms14 comments

please :( We can all find the front page of reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/87y7f/the_monste...

I'm not usually one to moan ;), but we have an article about marriage, an article on autism, an article on a board game, and "Ex-IMF Official: the U.S. is coming to resemble Argentina, Russia" at the top of hacker news.

As this trend continues, the front page becomes less and less useful (In my opinion) as it starts to overlap more and more with reddit, digg, etc etc.

I don't know the answer, but the trend really does seem to be accelerating fast now.

Just look at the hacker news front page from January 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080109085729/http://news.ycombi...

The difference between that front page, and the current front page is pretty marked IMHO.

Comment threads like this are off-topic and toxic. If you think Hacker News is ruined by all of these horribly interesting articles and something drastic most be done, make a new post.

>Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"make a new post."

Or perhaps a new site for just 'hacker news' without the rest ;)

Flagging only works if the moderators + pg agree it's off topic (Enough people flagged the Marriage article and it was killed, but then was apparently brought back to life anyway) :/

Appealing to the community to stop upvoting non hacker news and checking the [new] articles for more relevant articles seems like it may have more effect on keeping the magic alive here.

If the community decide they want to read the same sort of articles you find on the front page of Reddit/Digg etc, then so be it, but I personally think it'd be a shame. There's plenty of interesting hacker stories in the [new] section that aren't getting on the front page.

The "upmod only" strategy of this site is now getting tested... What that means is that the old guard have no power to enforce social orthodoxy upon any new visitors, so norms like "a site called hacker news should be about hacker news" cannot be enforced, and therefore disappear. Nor do the moderators seem to care to enforce the rules, so...

I would guess that in a year or so, the front page of news.ycombinator.com won't contain even one programming story most of the time. Paul Graham's essay says he thinks there's nothing wrong as of February 2009:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

so I suppose no official action is being taken or contemplated. Unfortunately, the character of a community is a lot easier and faster to destroy than one would think, and can never be restored, and so I suspect that by the time any action might be contemplated, it will already be too late.

It's already too late. It's gotten worse every day for the last month, I think.

Not everyone here goes to Reddit. This was actually a really good read and I'm glad it was posted.

For the 50th time at least, I will reiterate (somewhat ironically) that the worst thing on HN isn't the off-topic stories but the constant meta-conversations about what is and isn't off-topic. Boring.

There does seem to be about 40% of HN articles also listed on programming.reddit, I guess the 2 communities do overlap...

maybe its time for tag-based filters on HN, and an automated onreddit tag?

Good article by a mother who is obviously in distress. I liked this because it reminds me of some of the really tough lessons people learn growing up.

You can reach a high level of anxiety when you believe two things at the same time that do not co-exist. In this case, the mother believed she should be supportive of her son no matter what and she also believed that her son was a monster and might be a monster. One does not support monsters. Yet one supports one's son no matter what.

The answer, of course, is that your parental duties require you to be a disinterested observer at times. Tough love is real love. But just saying that doesn't mean people can learn it. Information is not the same as the knowledge.

And then there is the romanticizing of disease. My wife used to work with kids with Down's Syndrome. This was for very young children. Usually the nurses and doctors would have a good idea of what was happening and it was a matter of confirming it and educating the parents. What she found was that the average parent, when confronted with somebody with a chronic disease, had a hopelessly romantic view due to Hollywood and "feel good" press about that disease.

That's not saying that you shouldn't hope, or that you should be cynical. But most kids with Down's have a very limited life. Most families with a Down's kid have to work very hard. It's a labor of love, sure, but it's not a movie. Most times it's a lifetime endeavor. Not everybody is made for doing it. There's nothing wrong with admitting that your personality type is not good for taking intensive care of a kid for your entire life. The distance between feel-good stories about things and the actual things themselves is huge.

It's easy to get in a cognitive bind like this mom. I hope that writing the essay helped her come to grips with the fact that her son is a monster. And there's nothing wrong with admitting it.

The answer, of course, is that your parental duties require you to be a disinterested observer at times. Tough love is real love.

This is very good advice for all the young hackers here who will grow up to be parents. If you'd like your children to be able to cope with running a start up business (as I do), then you sometimes have to stop being mom or dad and be someone looking at what they do as a would-be partner or customer would.

The article reminded me of this one:

http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/article1152846.ece/Hoogl...

It's in Dutch, so I'll translate the most important part:

Sarah Janssen (53) was recently appointed as the first Professor of Deaf Blindness in the world.

According to the Groningen professor doctors and ortho educators often are unaware that children and deaf and blind. Thus they are often seen as autistic or mentally disabled, while mentally sometimes there is nothing wrong.

There is no immediate relationship with the article, but to me it shows that there is still much to learn in this area.

I just read the fifth child by Doris Lessing, a novel about a family destroyed by a child who is a 'throwback', a kind of neanderthal, or troll. On amazon, there is a comment from a woman who claims to have lived through that, which made me really wonder. Real life trolls?

And now in this article an autist is described as a warty monster from a Grimm fairy tale, and I suddenly understand what this novel is about. I am a little shocked to see an autist portrayed as a troll in a horror story.

This is a follow-up to an earlier article; you could read that one first if you would like. http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/05/18/autism_misdiagno...

Just finished reading, I'm speechless.

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