
The Background Noise Was Louder than I Realized - prajjwal
http://prog21.dadgum.com/155.html
======
inerte
I too do all these things listed by James, skipping articles and comparisons.
But that's because I am now an expert: I've read far too much about dynamic
vs. static to have the patient to fully read the good old opinions about this
subject.

The same about comparisons, I know it's 10% better than last year's because
last year I actually read an article, and it was 10%-15% better than 2010,
which was 10% better than 2009.

Two things helped: I stopped doing the engineering dance, dueling trivia with
others. I don't care if the new iPhone does 5 times less network requests on
maps when not on wi-fi but gets less POIs because the map provider is
pulverized, on China is X while on Iceland is Y, but on San Francisco bla bla
bla. Frankly, talking to a Wikipedia is boring.

The other thing that helped is that I gave up trying to live on the bleeding
edge of anything. I don't sleep on the line to buy an iPad mini, I wait three
days if and when I have the free time. I don't know what's the current best
SSD, I google it when I am actually about to buy it. Slowing down is one of
the best things I ever did. I have lots of friends that complain about being
too "anxious" (all properly self-diagnosed). Just don't do something if you
know you'll be complaining about it later.

~~~
PaulHoule
I wouldn't take it for granted that it's 10-15% better than last year.

Up until a few years ago, for instance, you could count on this year's CPUs
being much better than last year's CPUs. After Intel came out with Nehalehm,
the pace has slowed down. The really interesting developments are in details
like virtualization support, SIMD instruction, and things like AMD's Fusion.
And it took me plenty of talking with people to really understand that Fusion
is nowhere near as exciting as I thought it was at first, since you can't get
high-end (or even medium) GPU performance out of RAM designed for CPU's.

The things I build today could be at their market peak three years in the
future so understanding the hardware on the market and where its going can be
the difference between making somethign that's commercially viable and
something that isnt.

------
petercooper
The author mentions the fine Hacker Monthly but curated e-mails also have a
role to play here. If you want something with more coverage and volume but
still remain sane, <http://www.hackernewsletter.com/> is a weekly newsletter
with the best of HN's links by HN's own 'duck'.

I do similar work with my Ruby Weekly, JavaScript Weekly, HTML5 Weekly and
StatusCode newsletters and frequently get e-mails from people who say they
like being subscribed so they can turn down the 'noise' they get on Twitter,
etc.

There are thousands of such regular, curated digests in almost any medium you
could think of. Not just e-mails or magazines, but podcasts, link blogs,
YouTube channels, and Twitter accounts too. Have a good look around on the
topics that interest you, subscribe to the digests, and then skip the noise.

~~~
kallus
Thanks for the tip! I personally use <http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>,
an automated feed of the ten new articles with most points. Since it comes
once a day, it helps me spend much less time here, just look it through in the
morning and be done.

The downside though, is that it gets close to impossible to join in on, or
even read, the discussions. When I see articles usually ~24h after they were
posted, the discussion page is so full of nested questions that it's really
hard to find anything more than the highest voted comment. How can curation be
combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way?

~~~
petercooper
Isn't the reason you use that service (waste less time here) specifically to
avoid getting drawn into the discussions? Serious question! :-)

 _How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better
working way?_

I think the issue isn't curation, since Slashdot is technically an editor
curated news service, but the _timing_. That is, how do you have a good
discussion when the timescales are so large rather than over the course of a
few hours?

Sites like MetaFilter - <http://www.metafilter.com/>, Edward Tufte's forum -
<http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1>, QBN -
<http://www.qbn.com/> \- and numerous blogs have solved this problem to a
great extent, IMHO, and intriguingly are all _single threaded_ (or in the case
of blogs, most, but not all).

~~~
kallus
> Isn't the reason you use that service (waste less time here) specifically to
> avoid getting drawn into the discussions? Serious question! :-)

No, not really. There is usually ~1 article each day where I get interested in
reading the discussion. When that happens, it is often disappointing to find
the discussion high-jacked by a top-voted comment that goes in a direction
that doesn't interest me. I'm sure there are interesting comments further down
the page, but on this site it's hard to find them. I think Slashdot handles
this a little better by letting you set a point threshold.

In the even fewer cases when I want to join the discussion, it is pretty
meaningless to add a comment to the bottom of a page which is more than a day
old.

> I think the issue isn't curation, since Slashdot is technically an editor
> curated news service, but the timing. That is, how do you have a good
> discussion when the timescales are so large rather than over the course of a
> few hours?

Yes! That frames the question much better.

> Sites like MetaFilter - <http://www.metafilter.com/>, Edward Tufte's forum -
> <http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1>, QBN -
> <http://www.qbn.com/> \- and numerous blogs have solved this problem to a
> great extent, IMHO, and intriguingly are all single threaded (or in the case
> of blogs, most, but not all).

Haven't used those sites, and it was hard to get a grip by taking a quick
look. How do they solve it? I think single threaded is great, but in my
experience it breaks down when the number of comments get too large.

Manually or semi-automatically curated discussions would probable be very
valuable.

~~~
petercooper
_There is usually ~1 article each day where I get interested in reading the
discussion. When that happens, it is often disappointing to find the
discussion high-jacked by a top-voted comment that goes in a direction that
doesn't interest me._

Do you use Twitter? If so, something like <https://twitter.com/newsyc50> or
<https://twitter.com/newsyc20> might work for you. There's a threshold but it
keeps you within an hour or two of most significant posts. (I'm not a fan as a
lot of the posts I enjoy /don't/ reach these thresholds.)

 _How do they solve it? I think single threaded is great, but in my experience
it breaks down when the number of comments get too large._

MetaFilter has been around since 1999 with the same format and surprisingly it
continues to work well. Single threading has a big effect on how discussions
go. It's hard to put into words.. I hope someone will write an academic paper
on single vs multi threaded discussions ;-)

My personal experience is it increases the signal to noise ratio and
discourages irrelevant contributions, with the frequent con of seemingly
endless discussions and polarization into two opposing factions of commenters.

Edward Tufte's forum is unusual. The discussions there are _glacial_.
Seriously, it's typical to only have a handful of responses after a month or
two but they're always spot on. It's an extreme example since Tufte's staff
personally moderates every comment and only the very best get through.

QBN is basically a mess. The way they make it work long term is that
responding to any thread bumps that thread back up to the top of the site, no
matter how old it is. There's a thread on the front page right now with 68,675
responses. This wouldn't work so well in an academic or technical environment
but actually goes well in a more chit chatty "arty" environment, which is
their main audience.

I think there's so much room to study this stuff formally. If they ever did, I
would be the first to order the textbook! :-)

~~~
BoppreH
I think MetaFilter works because of the relative low number of users, and
their selection, since it's a paid website (to comment, at least).

I'm only a spectator there, but I've noticed the threads are much more
personal. I think you can even see the individuals that favorited a given
story or comment.

~~~
dnissley
Don't forget moderators who are dedicated to "doing it right". You do kind of
have to figure out and fit into the culture there.

If a new user doesn't get it and causes problems the mods will usually
politely PM them and talk to them about what's going on. If the user continues
to cause problems (start fights and just generally be inflammatory to the
community) they will have no problem banning them.

They also temp-ban users who they know are normally well behaved when they are
clearly having a bad day (which usually just means that a particular thread on
a particular topic hits too close to home and they just can't be civil about
it).

------
yawaramin
@James Hague: so what are the unusual blogs you're subscribing to? I'm always
on the lookout for that kind of stuff. I'll start off with one of my
discoveries: the feed for a readlist (<http://readlists.com/>) created by a
guy named Stu Sherwin: <http://readlists.com/user/stusherwin/feed/>

~~~
jseliger
I'm fond of my own blog, which is about books and ideas; you can find in my
profile if you're curious.

The Feature: <http://thefeature.net/> is excellent.

Hooking Up Smart is great if you're interested in sex, gender relations,
relationships, and dating: <http://www.hookingupsmart.com>.

I Use This: <http://usesthis.com/> can be surprisingly helpful at times. I
discovered Pigma Micron pens through it!

------
orofino
I find this interesting, because as some have pointed out here, there is a LOT
of noise on HN. There's a simple fix for this though, don't click on the
posts.

I went for a couple months without checking HN and to be honest I felt like I
was missing something. I like knowing what the latest things are and what cool
projects people are working on. I enjoy many of the well written comments.

I find that the things I learn about on HN aren't necessarily something that
is helpful immediately, but something that I can recall when I have an itch.
Perhaps we're implementing analytics emails for consumers at work and using
PhantomJS is an interesting option. Or... whatever.

There is a ton of noise, I simply don't click on posts about languages any
longer.

~~~
ExpiredLink
> There's a simple fix for this though, don't click on the posts.

There's a slight problem wrt this though, you can't really judge an article by
its title.

------
Camillo
Since when is Hacker News a programming news site? AFAICT it's mainly a
startup news/self-promotion vehicle, with a few programming articles thrown in
to satisfy the technical cofounders.

------
tedmiston
For more about avoiding noise on the web, see The Slow Web by Jack Cheng [1].

1: <http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web>

------
jnazario
this is a serious struggle i face, too. in my role i have to stay fresh and on
top of large areas, new ideas, and what's coming next. curation, while
tempting, leads to an echo chamber. i've built curation tools for the past ten
years, mostly for myself (and they work really well, i share them with select
friends), but ultimately i have to withstand the noise and dig out interesting
stuff.

i just triage quickly, to be honest, and i try not to rely on other people to
do my curation for me (either crowd-based selection or manual selection). i
can stil avoid much of the same old noise and debates but i get to see new
ideas, perspectives, topics, and things.

some of the links here have been great to see, however, and i will have to
utilize them. thanks for sharing them.

------
ksikka
The fact that this article has 38 comments by now is proof of his point. Noise
will happen, you can't change culture. Nothing to debate here.

------
nirvana
Hacker News has become the source of the noise for me and I'm increasingly not
coming here. I often block it in my hosts file, in fact, along with reddit and
Facebook.

There is still, occasionally, a relevant technical article (that's not
primarily opinion) or link to a new open source project that is relevant to my
interests.

But that seems to be around %2-4 of the content.

HN is crowded out with submissions that are designed primarily to be excuses
to be outraged at anyone who believes in intellectual property, or that isn't
a leftist, with the occasional outrage at violations of privacy thrown in.

And you certainly can't have a good discussion on those articles-- haters
going to hate, and leftists hate private property and fandroids hate apple.

This is the fourth time I've seen this happen.

The first was slashdot, which by 2002 or so, was so overrun with GPL fascists
that you couldn't say anything short of the party line, less it be downvoted
to oblivion. Then Digg which gave so much power to early users that it was
pointless to even try. Then Reddit which has its general /r/politics
subreddit-- which _everyone_ is subscribe to by default- with a moderation
policy that bans anyone who doesn't toe the leftist line well enough to goose
step. And now Hacker News.

Once I did an experiment. There was an article where I didn't like the
outcome, along with most of HN, but the principle involved, a greater
principle, one that most on HN claim to espouse, was being violated. I posted
a comment noting that I didn't like the outcome, naming the principle, noting
that most of us agree with that principle, and then showing how upholding that
principle (eg: not being a hypocrite) required us to temper our outrage. I got
downvoted to oblivion (which on HN helpfully means your post fades into the
background making it impossible to read, which I find hilarious- we're not
just going to put you at the bottom of the page, we're going to make it
impossible for those who are broad minded enough to scroll down to even read
it.)

So, despite agreeing with the majority, clearly explaining my position, and
why I hated having to reach that conclusion, what the principle was, and why
we all generally agree with that principle... I was still downvoted, because I
wasn't making a post agreeing with the party line.

That's the point when I accepted that moderation is broken, and Hacker News is
not a place where good discussion can happen reliably.

I think human curation has failed. Ideological downvotes have killed the
signal to noise ratio of all four of these sites.

~~~
taybin
How about some specifics? I get suspicious when I see "leftists" thrown
around.

~~~
nirvana
Here's some specifics:

Anything having to do with the 2008 fiscal crisis. Anything having to do with
monetary policy in general.

Hell, just try pointing out that the IR absorption of CO2 is less than that of
water vapor (eg: clouds) in a discussion of global warming. You'll get no end
of "all scientists believe in global warming[1]" and downvotes, for this
scientific fact.

[1] This is, by far, the most anti-intellectual and offensive statement.
Science doesn't work by majority. Worse, it is simply factually false. There
is no survey of scientists to determine their votes, and there is a sizable
contingent of scientists who refute it or dispute it. Further, the references
to "science" that this side makes generally come from IPCC reports, which is
to say, reports prepared by politicians which in the past have often been
refuted by the very scientists whose research they claim to be summarizing.

This issue is really a good one, because it is a purely scientific one, it is
relatively straightforward and easy to disprove (Mars was warming at the same
time, with the earth and the solar cycle, despite having no Hummers, the earth
has been getting cooler for the past decade, despite CO2 going up, the
"warming" period coincides with ice ages, and the "evidence", namely the Mann
"hockey stick" was the result of outright fraud).... yet the people who
believe it believe it for ideological reasons, and actually reject science,
making scientific discussions impossible. (Global warming is the left's
creationism!) all you can get is insistence that all scientists believe in it
(all christians believe in creationism, right? Actually they don't all believe
in it, possibly a majority don't.) Or you can get pointers to scientific
sounding blog posts that at the root end up being nonsense.

The closest I've ever gotten to an actual scientific debate on global warming
was with a physicist who, in the end, was reduced to insisting that man made
carbon dioxide had different effects on the atmosphere than "naturally
occurring" carbon dioxide. At that point I gave up- I can't argue with a
belief like that.

How many people do you think on Hacker News believe in Global Warming? How
many of them have ever looked up the IR absorption of CO2? Or would listen to
that point?

How many people on Hacker News reject intellectual property out of hand? How
many of them can derive, from first principles, an explanation for any private
property ownership? I believe the former is the majority and the latter is a
tiny fraction. Yet they "believe in private property" -- but only
situationally. (EG: Ok to steal movies, but not cars, or money, unless you're
the government, then its ok to steal money if you call it taxes. Is that not a
reasonable characterization of "leftist" positions? Ok, then how can a leftist
believe in the principle of private property if its sometimes ok to steal? By
redefining the word "steal"?)

~~~
btilly
You seem to have fallen off of an ideological deep end to the point of
resisting basic facts, and an unwillingness to accept any position other than
your own as "leftist".

The IR absorption of CO2 is well-known. As is its longevity in the atmosphere,
and the amount being put up there by people.

The IR absorption of H2O is also well-known. As is the fact that it tends to
precipitate out of the atmosphere, and is not being released by human
activities in much greater quantity than was the case historically. (However
it is released as the climate changes.) Furthermore H20 has multiple effects -
in the form of vapor it is a great greenhouse gas, in the form of clouds it is
a great reflector of light, as it precipitates, it removes other things that
can cause global warming, if it precipitates as snow, it causes cooling, etc.
In any detailed modeling of climate, it is very important and difficult to get
the impacts of H20 right.

However in your world global warming is false, and anyone who believes in it
is an ignorant leftist. And you think that you can argue this from an IR curve
that I guarantee has been thought about more deeply by scientists than you
have ever thought about it.

I also suspect that your understanding and my understanding of "private
property" is different than yours. You would claim my disagreement with your
viewpoint to be ignorance. I, most Americans, most lawyers, and legal
historians all disagree with you. At some point you should consider whether it
is more likely that you're the lone genius who knows what is right, or whether
you're out of touch with reality.

------
cmccabe
James claims not to be burned out, but I think I can see the telltale signs.
If you're interested in programming, you won't arbitrarily declare that big
parts of programming are "below the threshold of what matters." That's a
pretty bold claim to make-- even most non-technical managers wouldn't go that
far.

I understand getting fed up with reading endless (often poorly argued) debates
online, but that's a different issue.

~~~
adestefan
At one point there's the realization that there are not as many hours in the
day as there used to be because of other obligations. That's the point where
your threshold of what really matters starts to get pretty close to the
ceiling. It has nothing to do with being burnt out and has more to do with
coming to grips with the fact that there's more to the world than you.

Although today is a special day (in most of the US) because you get that
"extra hour." _Grumble_ _grumble_ DST...

