
Shit HN Says - dsirijus
https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
======
alecco
EDIT: now it's completely banned, not even on 2nd page.

Aaaand... downgraded from front page by mods.

    
    
      3.
      India outsourcing back to USA (washingtonpost.com)
      67 points by nightbrawler 3 hours ago | flag | 26 comments
      ....
      31.  [first of 2nd page]
      Shit HN Says (twitter.com)
      166 points by dsirijus 3 hours ago | flag | 66 comments

~~~
charliesome
I was wondering what was with that. It could easily be #1...

~~~
alecco
These are the same kind of moderator games vs. community Digg played before
collapsing into oblivion.

~~~
18pfsmt
I think you underestimate how many of us simply flag these kinds of
submissions, as they are neither intellectually stimulating, nor do they
promote interesting discussions. There probably isn't as much "moderation" on
HN as you seem to theorize.

I wouldn't have even seen your comment were it not for the 'new comments'
page.

~~~
alecco
No, it's been happening a lot recently. There was a huge thread about it a
little while ago. One of the main mods was behind the bans. Also flagging
doesn't automatically delete posts, mods do that.

This is very sad, I used to have the highest respect of PG and RTM. But it's
dropping like a stone in the water.

~~~
scott_s
I thought that if enough users flag a post, it gets automatically deleted.
Also, I thought that accumulated flags harms a posts' score. Has anyone said
otherwise?

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Swizec
What I want to know is who's running that account?

I want to buy them a chocolate heart or something. Maybe some bacon.

Shaped as a heart.

~~~
fogus

        What I want to know is who's running 
        that account?
    

Technically, Hacker News.

------
barik
This is fantastic. I followed it immediately. It reminds me of a condensed
version of The Daily WTF [1] or perhaps <http://bash.org/>, but for Hacker
News. More amusingly, it seems to have that strange meta property in which
this thread itself is sure to generate a few more tweets, much in the same way
that no one is quite sure if the real Daily WTF is the post itself or the
comments that try to solve the problem in the post.

[1] <http://thedailywtf.com/>

------
Udo
It's actually not as bad as I expected it to be from the title.

However, the lack of links to sources as well as the obvious limitations of
Twitter mean this idea could be executed much better.

~~~
Sirupsen
Really? You want a shithnsays.com? The beauty of this idea is providing smiles
in your Twitter timeline once in a while. Not to execute a cool-lean-webscale-
startup.

~~~
Udo
It doesn't need its own domain, but the Twitter format is so limited, I'm not
very likely to visit this again even though it was quite entertaining. Maybe
make it a blog instead? It doesn't need its own domain or anything.

> Not to execute a cool-lean-webscale-startup.

Now you're just attacking a straw man, aren't you? :)

~~~
narcan
You don't use Twitter by visiting individual accounts. Pro-tip: Try the
'follow' feature.

~~~
icebraining
Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know.

And before you tell me how I expect to follow Twitter accounts without one of
my own, let me tell you that I follow dozens of blogs without having an
account in any of them or their platforms.

~~~
barik
"Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know."

I think Twitter is absolutely the right way to go on something like this. Your
post is even more peculiar since Twitter supports RSS. [1] Does your reader
not support RSS? (Okay, okay, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, since it actually
__isn't__ all that obvious that Twitter does support it; I had to Google it
myself).

[1] Here's the one for shit_hn_says:
<http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/752430234.rss>

Add it to Google Reader and enjoy! You don't need a Twitter account, so your
major concern should be alleviated at this point.

~~~
icebraining
I'm not constantly mentioning I don't have a Twitter account. I mentioned it
because it's relevant.

 _Your post is even more peculiar since Twitter supports RSS [2]. Does your
blog client not support RSS?_

It does, I just wasn't aware that Twitter supported RSS, since nowhere in the
page (not even in the source) do they link to it. Can one find its URL without
doing arcane magic?

That said, the I do agree that Twitter is a decent place to publish these,
although it still has the length limit that prevents them from putting links
to the comments.

~~~
barik
> I'm not constantly mentioning I don't have a Twitter account. I mentioned it
> because it's relevant.

Perhaps, but I think my sarcastic tone was warranted, at least before giving a
serious answer. You could have said:

"I don't have a Twitter account. How would I follow something like this?"

Instead, you chose the more snarky:

"Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know."

which takes on an almost condescending tone.

Anyway, I've been annoyed myself with the walled garden approach that many of
these social sites are taking. Even Facebook has RSS feeds, but it isn't
exactly obvious how to get to them. And Twitter seems to be more and more
going towards the route of closing off third-party access. But if you're
determined enough (and I realize most people won't be; even my finding of the
RSS feed was mostly an intellectual exercise), it does appear possible to
satisfy your requirements of using your existing Feed system to keep up to
date with Twitter posts without having to have a Twitter account.

But like you, I would also have expected that I could simply put the Twitter
URL directly into my Reader and have it auto-discover the RSS feed as most
proper implementations do. Sadly, this is not the case, and having to somehow
know the internals of the Twitter API as a user and not a developer is
incredibly convoluted.

Edit: For posterity, I went ahead and removed the snarkiness. Chain broken.

~~~
icebraining
_I think my sarcastic tone was warranted, at least before giving a serious
answer._

But my post was itself snarky in response to narcan's "Pro-tip". It's a snark
chain!

------
btilly
Like everyone else I would like them to add the post id so people can easily
find the source of the quote.

I also think that a distinction should be made between comments that are
ridiculous (like Node.js being close to the metal) versus surprising (what one
quote claims is true - men actually are over-represented in the top 1% of the
population by IQ - of course men also dominate the bottom 1%).

~~~
gilrain
IQ does not equal intelligence, except possibly in the extreme subsets of
mental abilities which actually feature on the test. It's not been treated
seriously in the scientific community for almost ever. It's almost solely a
cargo cult for people who excel at it and want to feel superior.

~~~
btilly
The scientific debate is much more complex than you give it credit for. Yes,
there really are people who believe that IQ, or (to be more sophisticated) g,
really has validity. I personally view it as convenient shorthand, but not
real. However this is not a universal position. For a take on why it is
probably not valid, see <http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html>.

But whether or not you accept that IQ is meaningful, the following fact
remains true. On a wide variety of abilities that we can measure, including
most specific mental attributes (working memory, processing speed, etc), males
have much higher variability than females. The average gender differences are
small, but men are over-represented in both tails. That fact is true both when
abilities are measured in isolation, or on a test that aggregates them, like a
standard IQ test.

See <http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_10.html#cronin> for an example of where
this is discussed.

~~~
csense
Of course, it's not politically correct to say that there are more guy
geniuses than girl geniuses, no matter how convincing the data may be. Saying
that there are more male idiots is presumably perfectly okay; people who care
about such things generally only care if it's the "minority" (never mind that
women are a numerical majority in the US [1]).

Caveats: I don't know how convincing the data is. My point is that the
discussion would not change even if the science happened to be completely
airtight. Anecdotally, many of the intelligent people I've met over the years
have happened to be women, so I'm inclined to believe in equality or even a
female-favorable situation for the high tail (but how this is affected by
socialization and cultural expectations is a topic for another post).

[1] <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html>

~~~
btilly
You are right.

The evidence on that correlation is actually very strong. However in our
society there is an effect that goes a long way to hide it. For a number of
reasons (including earlier puberty), women have a significant academic
advantage in high school. This means that about 60% of people heading to
college are women.

So if you're in an environment with lots of young college educated young
people, all will be reasonably smart (they had to be to get into college), and
you have on average about half-again as many women as men. If you just take
this population and look for the top quartile, women are still over-
represented relative to men.

What about the smart men that I said existed, where are they? They are
everywhere. It turns out that if your IQ is in the top 2%, you have worse odds
of finishing high school than if your IQ is median. Lots of smart people make
it nowhere near college for various combinations of reasons. If you mostly
hang out with college graduates, you might never notice that, for instance,
there are some really smart car mechanics out there.

------
mootothemax
Interesting that it appears to be being run by hand using Buffer
(<http://bufferapp.com/>). From outward appearance at least, not a bot.

~~~
tathagatadg
How to botify this? The easiest I can think of is to keep polling for the most
downvoted comment ... any fancy information retrieval effort is bound to
generate false positives.

And oh yes ... I see what you are thinking, HN Hall of Shame - handles with
get most downvotes/week ranked in reverse sorted. Reverse gamification. It
obviously needs to be like a leaderboad. And obviously has to have a REST api.
Now you want "web-scale" -- Node.js+MongoDb+HTML5 charts ...

~~~
mibbitier
I think the aim would be to poke fun at the bubble community rather than
downvoted comments.

Some of the most upvoted comments on HN are the most ridiculous and absurd.

------
purephase
I love it. I searched for a few of these just to confirm that real comments
were being used.

Was not disappointed.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Oh wow. These are real? I thought they were mostly jokes.

~~~
nodata
Needs links really.

------
snorkel
... and when assembly isn't fast enough then I drop down to binary.

------
kenkam
We now have to make sure all our sentences are longer than 140 chars to avoid
being featured.

Unless you want to be featured of course.

------
NickPollard
How long before this thread goes recursive?

~~~
dsirijus
23 minutes ago.

------
manaskarekar
I think it would be way cooler if they were quoted word for word (with a link
to the original post).

~~~
unimpressive
This. I wanted to source some of these to make sure they were legit and turned
up empty. But I know some of them are real because I read the originals.

------
darkstalker
We'll now have a nice list of HN readers on twitter

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Frostbeard
I was expecting more misogyny. I may be spending too much time on reddit.

(Edit: To be clear, I'm referring to the group "Shit Reddit Says", who
highlight and then downvote instances of misogyny and the like in reddit
comments).

------
marknutter
HN is starting to go meta like Reddit went and I'm not sure that's a good
thing. How on earth is it productive or healthy to publicly ridicule HN
commenters?

~~~
dsirijus
It's popping some HN bubbles. I find that extremely healthy, if not
neccesarily productive.

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theycallmemorty
See also: <http://twitter.com/HackerNewsTips>

------
icebraining
Oh look, copyright infringement ;)

------
mparlane
I have a feeling this thread will be made pseudo-dead. [and this post haha]

------
peterwwillis
Because there isn't enough retarded shit on twitter.

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jacques_chester
I've been out-jerked. :(

------
crygin
See also: <http://twitter.com/hackernews_txt>

------
Lewton
This is fairly retarded. It's not hard to make something look foolish when you
take a single sentence out of context.

~~~
thirsteh
If those tweets actually appeared in text somewhere on Hacker News, they are
foolish regardless of the context they were taken from. Dropping down to
node.js to get close to the metal? Come on!

Love it.

~~~
itmag
_Dropping down to node.js to get close to the metal?_

It's actually not that strange of a remark, depending on context.

~~~
ibotty
with what definition of metal again?

~~~
phillmv
Why, V8 of course.

~~~
ibotty
that's still an "unusual" (to say the least) definition.

~~~
thirsteh
Hopefully sarcastic.

