

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics - rms
http://www.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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csbartus
I was a bit disappointed with the Zed Shaw flame war. On a good technical
article people started to express their feelings about Zed, avoiding to
discuss the technical issues raised.

Still the subject remains shady even it is affecting seriously the hacker
world.

[UPDATE] A separate thread was made to discuss the shady issues:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709583>

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jacquesm
I agree with this very much. Slashdot suffers greatly from this (or it thrives
on it, depends on your point of view I guess).

Apple vs Microsoft, Republicans vs Democrats, GPL vs BSD license, RIAA vs the
world etc the discussions are always the same and nobody learns a thing.

It's a mindset problem, a flamewar does not do anything to advance the topic
it just causes everybody to dig in just a little deeper.

~~~
billswift
Only to the participants. I actually find many of the arguments interesting,
if repetitive. After you have seen the SAME arguments many times though it
does get wearing.

Actually, the arguments can be useful to help get newbies try different
programs/environments and you explore WHY you agree or disagree with various
viewpoints. The emacs vs vi flames I read when I was first getting started
caused me to keep trying to use vi, until I was finally able to understand why
I found it so difficult. (I just cannot get used to its modes; I continually
forget whether I am in insert, append, or command mode and have to go back and
fix the goofs that causes.)

EDIT: I should have read down a little further before commenting; the idea of
a wiki exploring the differing opinions is excellent from my POV.

~~~
billswift
The above was actually talking more about the "religious" wars than flaming as
such. The best flaming site I have seen was Panda's Thumb back several years
ago; they often had hundreds on comments with atheists, creationists, and
religious-apologist atheists screaming back and forth at each other, but it
was very entertaining, I've rarely read Panda's Thumb for the last few years
since they've quit the flaming.

------
rms
>Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something
genuinely new to say about them.

is the entire guideline, too long for a title.

~~~
duairc
I know this is off-topic, but your username is slightly misleading. :)

~~~
rms
Yes, it's something of a joke. :D <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124391>

------
rms
"Classic flamewar topics" is interesting enough to define further. Is it a
small list of banned arguments? Is it more a set of behaviors?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_%28Internet%29>

My favorite of these topics (edit: I meant "classic" on the internet as a
whole, not specifically to Hacker News. How many classic flamewar arguments do
we really have?) is the discussion about .999 repeating equaling one.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692338> links to a physics forum
discussing it for 400 forum pages. It goes on because no one ever gets the
right answer because both sides are correct and wrong at the same time and
it's completely an issue of definition. The answer is to define the problem
more precisely which allows you to argue that the naive perspective is
ultimately correct for the hyperreal number system.

~~~
ErrantX
.999 wasn't really a flame topic is it? Some people learned stuff they didnt
know about infinity. Others presented fairly good arguments for .999... != 1
and we spent time disproving that. ANd others introduced Hyperreal numbers
whihc some hadn't heard of.

No one got angry or passionate or flamey as I saw it... the topic never made
it much onto the main page and was a nice discussion.

Im not disagree with the sentiment "avoid flame topics" - I just dont think
that is a good example.

A better one would be the current TC article on the main page (and all the
boring meta discussion on "ban techcrunch" and flaming about pg & ma being
buddies).

~~~
rms
Right, it wasn't a flame war here, I was referring to the 400 page version on
PhysOrg. We could handle the topic -- by the end of the PhysOrg thread (I only
read the last page) they're calling each other retards over the definition of
continuous for limits.

A topic that gets ugly here sometimes and where no one ever has anything new
to say is genes, nationality, and IQ.

Meta discussion is a very different type of flame topic. It's also been
extremely important to defining the character of this board so seperating it
MetaFilter style is a drastic step. How can we discourage metatalk when it is
annoying but allow it when it is interesting?

~~~
ErrantX
Ok yes so the thread was a flamewar - but the way I saw the topic was as a
conversation starter (rather than just post an Ask HN thread). I doubt many
people read past the first page :)

But I take your point.

In terms of meta discussion; all that is fine. I just mean it should be
considered "non gratis" to bring up flamey meta topics. Like Ban TC and so
forth. It's been discussed a billion times before and always leads to flaming.

EDIT: I also love the rule that says if you've been here for less than a year
dont moan about thinks going reddity - that's another pet-hate meta topic of
mine :(

------
nathanwdavis
I really like cute animal pictures.... it's a shame I have to post those
elsewhere. :)

~~~
biohacker42
I complain here about inappropriate stuff a lot, and I you know you're kidding
but: As far as fluff goes I'll take cute animal pictures over all the other
fluff that shows up here.

------
rbanffy
Obviously the Apple II is far superior to the TRS-80 family for any serious
computing task. Ataris are good for gaming and the Commodore 64 has a disk-
drive that's too slow for any practical use. As for the MSX machines, they
have no soul.

I am sorry. Could not resist.

Note: This post is best viewed at 300 bps.

~~~
bcl
The Atari wasn't just for games!

Oh, my. Now we've gone and done it...

------
DougWebb
God told me that if you interpret the bible correctly, it proves that Man's
fingers were designed to use vi, not emacs. But only on Windows. Discuss.

------
cnlwsu
Perhaps one of the recurring topics that I think introduce flame wars on here
is all of the Mac-PC articles that keep popping up. They never introduce
anything new or provide anything beyond attempting to justify fanboydom.

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tokenadult
Would it be fair to say that all topics explored in Paul Graham essays,

<http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

which includes my favorite topic of education reform, are not classic flamewar
topics?

~~~
jjs
It would be fair to say, "use your discretion". Any topic can be presented in
an inflammatory manner.

~~~
tokenadult
That's an interesting response. That implies that something that is very much
a core topic of HN discussion could be nothing but flame bait if the treatment
of it in the submission is sufficiently inflammatory.

~~~
jjs
Exactly. I may enjoy pie, but you won't win my favor by presenting me a pie to
the face.

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radley
like... Flash?

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Devilboy
Instead of restarting flamewars just link to the original flamewar?

~~~
cturner
That's an interesting idea. Imagine a wikipedia-like site that aimed to be the
definitive guide to known flamewars. I'm just trying to comprehend the carnage
that such a system would cause between the people who cared about the site for
what it represented vs the people who just cared about their varying legs of
the debate.

feuerkrieg.com is available.

~~~
gabrielroth
It would be great if, instead of posting the same arguments over and over,
people were editing and strengthening a canonical version of that argument. At
least you'd get higher-level flamewars.

The difficulty would be preventing people from deliberately weakening the
other side's argument.

~~~
cturner
Prejudiced users could vote their way into threads in order to support the
particular details and rebuttals to which they subscribed.

Then you could use the data from the results to morph it into a dating site.
Particularly twisted members could opt for the 'opposites' option. Or you
could make it random. You don't know until you turn up for coffee -
mwuhahahah!

People said that the internet would make the human race more open and
tolerant. I have other ideas.

------
TweedHeads
While we are at it, please avoid FUD, payperpost, PR submarines and tabloid
gossip.

