

Show HN: Infinite Monkeys – Pooling the Wisdom of Hacker News Comments - chaghalibaghali
https://github.com/thomshutt/infinite-monkeys

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colanderman
Let us not forget
[https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says) \--
pooling the "wisdom" of Hacker News comments.

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shubhamjain
For anyone interested, an active HNer Edward Weismann (edw519) made an
eBook[1] out of his contributions on HN. Certain of his opinions can be
disagreed with but there is a lot of wisdom in his comments.

[1]:
[http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html](http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html)

~~~
hackuser
> active HNer Edward Weismann (edw519) made an eBook[1] out of his
> contributions

Perhaps we all should think of our contributions as material for a future
book. Imagine the thoughtfulness of our comments and the reduction in noise.

~~~
untog
But Hacker News isn't a platform for posting essays. You're supposed to have
back and forth discussions. If all we get a treatises from on high discussion
threads aren't going to be worth reading.

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chaghalibaghali
Inspired by the recent 'What are the most uplifting comments you've read on
HN?' discussion [1], I've compiled some of my favourites into an eBook. Pull
requests welcome!

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393213)

~~~
Munksgaard
May I suggest a gh-pages branch so one can view the html online?

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chaghalibaghali
Done!

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kenbellows
just submitted a little PR with a bootstrap-based index.html for easier
reading, and to give the project a front page

~~~
chaghalibaghali
Merged - thanks for this, it looks so much nicer!

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jdiez17
From the name I thought it was going to be a book of text generated by a
Markov chain trained on HN comment data. Took me a while to figure out it
wasn't.

Anyway, good collection of comments. It'd be useful to have a HTML version
linked in the README.

~~~
chaghalibaghali
The HTML version is now linked, enjoy!

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timdaub
I'm currently working on a similar idea:
[https://github.com/TimDaub/hnwisdom](https://github.com/TimDaub/hnwisdom)

I'm trying to collect wise hackernews comments.

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ArekDymalski
Brilliant idea. I regret that I didn't bookmark many pearls of wisdom (and
wit) which appeared here.

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beat
It'd be interesting to separate upvotes from downvotes somehow. I've observed
that many of my most-upvoted comments receive a _lot_ of downvotes as well -
usually for questioning HN conventional wisdom. And I find most of the
comments that I really like, that I think are really outstanding, are at odds
with the groupthink as well.

~~~
dragonwriter
It seems to me that most of the claims that posts are "att odds with the
groupthink" and claims that posts are "downvoted for questioning HN
conventional wisdom" refer to posts that are in line with the frequently-
articulated positions of at least as large of a segment of the HN community as
any that they are at odds with.

Its natural to want to think that those who disagree with or downvote you are
engaging in "groupthink" or defending "conventional wisdom" and those who
agree with or upvote you are independent thinkers or rewarding independent
thought.

But I don't think upvoting is any less prone to groupthink or downvoting any
less prone to having a substantive basis.

~~~
beat
Well, sure. You're not going to get upvoted at all if _everyone_ disagrees
with you.

But I've noted a very distressing tendency toward comments accumulating
significant downvotes not for being wrong, but for being different. Hell, I
just got multiple downvotes for saying you should use containers for
development even if you're developing on a Linux desktop, because containers
are repeatable and your desktop is not. That's kind of a duh thing, but
apparently people find it offensive. That's one example, but I've seen it
happen a lot, and to a lot of posters making technically correct and logically
valid points.

~~~
dragonwriter
> But I've noted a very distressing tendency toward comments accumulating
> significant downvotes not for being wrong, but for being different.

I've noted a very distressing tendency for people on HN to assume that no one
could possibly disagree with their subjective interpretation of the relevance
and degree of substantive contribution of a post, and to therefore assume that
downvotes of posts that the complaining poster agrees finds to be insightful
must be based on differentness, not on differing subjective interpretations on
relevance and degree of substantive contribution. And, further, to state the
conclusion of this stack of assumptions as a simple fact.

~~~
beat
So do you think disagreement alone is grounds for downvoting? Maybe I'm weird,
but I'll often upvote comments I disagree with, if I think they're
interesting.

Downvotes as cultural reinforcement is a real problem. And it's a bad idea,
imho. I've seen it in the technical community since the idea of comment voting
was introduced back in the glory days of Slashdot, 17 years or so ago. It
distresses me to see HN doing the same thing.

~~~
dragonwriter
> So do you think disagreement alone is grounds for downvoting? Maybe I'm
> weird, but I'll often upvote comments I disagree with, if I think they're
> interesting.

Disagreement is fairly explicitly -- i.e., per pg -- an acceptable reason for
downvoting, though I don't prefer to use it that way and will often upvote
posts I disagree with that I feel add value to the discussion.

But that's irrelevant to my point in GP -- my point is that people to tend to
present self-serving _assumptions_ about the motivation behind downvotes of
particular posts as if they were established facts.

> Downvotes as cultural reinforcement is a real problem.

Downvotes as cultural reinforcement is a central element of community
moderation -- "cultural reinforcement" is how the particular character of a
community is maintained, and "community moderation" is expressly the decision
to give that reinforcement to the community. And that's _just_ as true for
downvotes-for-lack-of-substance as for downvotes-for-disagreement.

Having seen both unmoderated and primarily centrally moderated communities, I
think community moderation is a fairly good approach (not without its
tradeoffs), and HN's form of community moderation is, IMO, one of the better
ones.

~~~
beat
Yeah. As much as I knock cultural reinforcement of wrongheaded assumptions
(it's no different in principle than fundie churches), community policing is
better than the alternatives.

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miket
Is there any way to generate this algorithmically, or otherwise view the most
upvoted comments on HN?

~~~
ColinWright
You mean like this?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments)

Linked via "lists" from the bottom of almost every page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)

