mhill

The 2nd comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799442) was downvoted. I saw it after I posted it. It was brought back up by others upto 1 later. Tried as I might I just couldn't understand the rational of the downvotes. I could only attribute it to the Reddit-like behavior where every submission has 33% downvotes, which is why I'm saying HN is heading the Reddit way.

For the first comment, it's pretty well-known that C#/VB.Net is way faster than PHP/Python/Ruby in raw performance. Benchmarks after benchmarks have shown that fact. Often it's just a matter of bringing it up as a reference in discussion. I don't want to prepare a benchmark for every statement I made.

I've seen plenty of opinionated single liners got plenty of upvotes, admittedly those stated the popular views, so single liner is not a good reason for downvote. But nevertheless I'm not into a popular contest. If HN can't tolerate diverge view/opinion, that's its loss.

Looks neat. Can you make it a translucent overlay bar instead of moving the whole page down? Moving the whole page can be annoying visually.

I'll show two of my encounters as a limited data point to illustrate that HN is not far from getting to the level of Progit.

In one post about shebang (#) being used in Facebook and Twitter, the discussion was about crawling Ajax pages. I asked a question on good practices to make a Ajax site crawler friendly. It got downvotes! I was truly puzzled. The question was purely technical, non-controversial, within the topic, and extending the discussion. Yet, there were people (long timers with downvote power) trying to discourage it. They were acting exactly like toxic as you described.

In another post about Joel's statement of SO being more scalable than Digg, people were giving this and that explanation but ignoring the obvious elephant in the room - .Net was faster PHP. I made that statement and got downvoted to oblivion. Of course people here hate Microsoft, are into dynamic-type languages, and prefer open-source but a technical fact is still a fact. This just shows how narrow-minded people here are who can't tolerate diverge approaches to problems.

Oh well, if they want it to be a toxic playground, they get it.

You have very good points (I think you meant unprofessional instead of non-professional).

Amazing. There are downvotes on your comment. This just shows what kind of community this is.

I have seen comments in HN similar to what you have experienced, comments from frequent posters as well.

The unpleasant thing is that people expect to be hand-fed their daily dose of intellectual stimulant, and got upset if the dosage is off. I've seen comments like, "Your submission/post/blog are lame. It's very annoying it wastes my time." WTF?! The guy spent lots of time writing a blog and asked for feedback. If it's not up to your level, just move on, no point in bashing the guy on wasting your time just because you don't find it stimulating.

What is more disheartening is the upvotes for those kinds of comments. It's really a turn-off.

I actually see quite a bit of the same mentality here. Anything deviated from the main stream of the latest fad will get downvoted. There's little appreciation of diverged opinions or opposite views.

Does anyone have suggestion on good practices to make an Ajax page crawler friendly? Since the anchor url (#) are generated on the fly by Javascript, how does the crawler know what anchor urls to follow given the parent page?

Are invisible urls (for archor urls) still frown upon by Google?

I've never had a chance to use dynamic programming in real life beyond school work. For "challenging" algorithm work in real life, I did topological sort for evaluating dependency graph, bloom filter for skipping lookup, NFA for executing regex-like rule graph, Rete for faster rule evaluation, extendible hashing for fast index storage, complex event flow graph with SQL-like nodes. Those are the ones I can remember now.

BTW, I did got bit by O(nlgn) vs O(n^2) issue, despite computers being fast nowaday. Once I used bubble sort in a cache system. It was quick and simple. Things work fine for small size cache but slowed down substantially when size > 10,000; n^2 => 100,000,000 ops. Switching to heap sort did solve the problem. So yes, understanding algorithmic complexity does help in real life work.

However, 99% of development are run of the mill coding.

I saw a post in Reddit doing frontpage snapshot yesterday http://redditsnapshot.sweyla.com/ and thought to myself, this is pretty cool; I should make one for HN. Today someone already has done it. Congrat.

That would increase the load on the database. Why does that increase the load on the webservers?

I thought people on HN are more open to technology discussion. It seems people can't handle their bubble being pierced when presented with facts.

It would be more interesting you have facts to refute my statement than downvotes.

[Sunglasses On] Sounds like the .Net stack performs much better than the LAMP stack.

A corollary: hiring older developers would have a distinct competitive advantage.

To support more rows than 70000?

Yeah, I thought MORE is an adjective while the other three are names.

$500 to $1000 a month for food? The food must be very good.