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Comment by markild | Hacker News Reader

The illustration at the bottom of this[0] xkcd "what if?" illustrates this pretty well.

Yes, I've been meaning to add that link at the bottom of the page with a short piece of text for context - I'll do that soon.

Thanks.

Edit: Done that now. Not sure why this comment got a downvote, though.

Extra Edit: Hmm, now been re-upvoted. Bizarre, but thanks for the votes! I know that they're not actually worth anything, but they do indicate that what I've done is appreciated, and considered to be of value.

With or without illustration, really enjoyed the write up.

Also fun to think about what would happen if you plot the value that is represented by the "mm^2" over time, and do an integration of the plotted graph. You somehow end up with a volume, or total fuel consumption over the period you integrate over.

Unit cancellation is cool stuff.

Vote cancellation is weird.

I wonder if posts that have no genuine reason to be downvoted (like yours) get more votes if they add a comment to the effect "Not sure why this comment got a downvote" since multiple people will try and correct the erroneous downvote with no idea whether anyone else already has.

Edit: Ha! Thanks for the downvote.

It is odd. When there's a strange downvote people might then make more upvotes because they can see it was downvoted, but can't see when it's been corrected, because the scores are no longer visible. But voting is weird anyway. I don't take it personally, and I don't want to complain, but I genuinely get confused when there are downvotes I don't understand, and I want explanations purely so I can decide either that I was right and to hell with it, or I was wrong and I need to reconsider things.

With just a downvote I don't get the chance to learn.

Still, there we are.

Conversely, if people could just upvote outright but to downvote would need to provide a minimum 10 character reason that was made public, would this break of improve the system?

So each bad comment would require a large comment thread? Seems like the opposite of what you'd want.

It could be displayed much more compactly, or not displayed at all to third parties.

A way to give feedback to the poster on inconsequential details such as language/spelling/typos/grammar/etc that isn't displayed to anyone else would be useful.

You're describing something like Slashdot's moderation system, and we all know how well that worked out.

Pretty well?

At +5, It is the best moderation system ever published. Immune to brigades, and reader-tunable to their individual preference level for jokes and flames.

Sometimes the ten characters minimum I would enter would be "You're a fucking moron." Since that's probably either unproductive due to incorrectness or unproductive because the person is not in a position to do anything about it or counter-productive because nothing good can from such a comment, the downvote is much better. I can allow the button to proxy for voicing the opinion "You're a fucking moron" and move on.

By extension the downvote as proxy covers lots of other cases which would add little of benefit to HN.

If the comment in question constituted destructive behaviour, go ahead, vote it down.

Let's assume now it was not destructive.

Error on the side of doubt that maybe you are wrong. If you can convince yourself with reasons that what is said is wrong, state your reasons. If you can't, don't down-vote.

That you are thinking "You're a fucking moron." is a big problem it itself. You are not alone with this problem, and it haunts HN.

On what basis have you come to believe that you are well positioned to offer reasoned advice in regard to how I, or anyone else should vote and comment on HN?

I didn't offer advice but judged you.

I judged you as I did to help make comments on HN suitable for having critical, rational, constructive and respectful discussions.

My basement is your comment.

And, being "well positioned" is not necessary for giving reasoned advice.

It already is suitable for those things. Downvoting in lieu of wrestling pigs in mud puddles is, in my experience is one reason why. [1] Complaining about karma and its mechanisms is a dead end from both a metaphysical and literary point of view.

Downvotes avoid turning disagreements into excuses to accuse other people of character flaws, as in your comments toward me.

[1] Though here apparently I cannot avoid the invitation.

    It already is suitable for those things.

Suitableness is not binary.

    Downvoting in lieu of wrestling pigs in mud puddles is, in my experience
    is one reason why.

Downvoting is often used on controversial comments. That blocks controversial discussion.

I think we should not block a controversial discussion if it's serious, rational and constructive.

    Complaining about karma and its mechanisms is a dead end from
    both a metaphysical and literary point of view.

Here you are overstating. It depends on the participants.

You can avoid that from happening by being constructive, respectful and serious, and stoping the discussion if the other is not.

    Downvotes avoid turning disagreements into excuses to accuse
    other people of character flaws, as in your comments toward me.

I see more options than either

(1) to downvote to disagree or

(2) to accuse other people of character flaws.

The attitude of thinking of other people one disagrees with as "fucking morons" is problematic independently on whether one downvotes for disagreement or not. It's not accusing a character flaw, it's simply criticizing one specific attitude.

I think you should be told. So, if nobody else would have said it, I would have done it anyway.

Downvotes are not only misused for expressing disagreement.

For example, this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9489042 of mine had in the beginning several downvotes.

Several people on HN downvote you for saying something is not understandable for you and asking for a transcript.

Is this really how we want HN to be?

Stop misusing downvotes.

It means that:

1. You didn't say what you thought you said,

:or

2. You said what you thought you said but didn't say it in a way that everyone understood.

:or

3. You said what you thought you said and someone didn't think it was worth saying.

:or

4. You didn't say what you thought you said and some didn't think what you said was worth saying.

:or

5. Karmic forces were at work.

It's worth assuming that the ones over which you have control are the reasons for a downvote, since those are the only ones from which you can learn. And given that everything else evens out statistically over time, it's not as if downvotes will ever stray too far from constructive criticism.

It's very easy to downvote comments by mistake when trying to upvote them on mobile. Shortly after posting just one mistake can make people feel they've done something wrong but it usually sorts itself out over time.

Thanks for that! Not being a native English speaker I couldn't really grasp what the author was trying to describe when he started talking about a "trough with a cross-sectional area of 0.1 mm2" and the following paragraph. This image made everything clear!

This is probably the kind of trough that's meant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watering_trough, detailed image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watering_trough#/media/File:Cat....

If you "think away" the actual trough and keep only the liquid, you get the cuboid that the text is referring to.

The kind of trough imagined in the article is actually precedented - although to replenish water and not fuel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_pan

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