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First year CS student excited to learn about a thing puts together a small website of academic papers, posts it to HN to share with others.

Then someone makes a shitty comment. Is that correct?

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It's always fun to remember how rude people were about Dropbox on here.

More seriously though, in many ways HN is a pretty broad church. You're always going to get a spectrum of opinions, and some portion of people are always going to be particularly forceful about putting forth their opinion. Maybe it's a bad day, maybe it's habit, varies from person to person and day to day, etc.

But I think, if you're posting something to HN (or, really, any large internet forum), negative feedback - and dismissive feedback - is something you need to be prepared for as part and parcel of the experience because it often is going to happen.

Not that I agree with the person you're responding to - their remark struck me as quite a mean-spirited and unnecessary comment, and I very much prefer your perspective.

Anyway, I've bookmarked the site so make of that what you will.


> negative feedback - and dismissive feedback - is something you need to be prepared

OK. Let's RFM: first line = "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

So, no, it's not HN-OK for rude & unfounded feedback to make it to the top comment.

Even if the website is "bad" (i.e. those 30 papers were never linked to Ilya etc.), the proper way of handling this is to call it out in a neutral way.


I think you're misunderstanding me or over-interpreting what I've said. I'm not justifying or excusing the unkind behaviour, and I'm aware of the site terms on HN.

What I'm saying is that in large online forums - regardless of terms of use - some people are unkind, and that it's a good idea to be prepared for that when you post something publicly.


fwiw for all the praise that dang & co get, they moderated this website into this state. there is a "blessed" way to break the rules and be a total asshole to people here, and there is the "other" way, that they punish relentlessly. we all have bad days, but HN's comments are just an exhausting cesspool of cynicism and cheap takes for the most part these days.

dang does not scale. It’s on us to make this place how we want it to be. Every comment matters

> some portion of people are always going to be particularly forceful about putting forth their opinion. Maybe it's a bad day, maybe it's habit, varies from person to person and day to day, etc.

I have no problem that someone had a bad reaction to this and needs to vent, I have a problem that the community deems it the most noteworthy comment and keeps it voted to the very top of the thread.


Probably a lot of people voting aren't aware of the terms of use. But, at any rate, it's certainly not the top comment now - it often takes a couple of hours or so for voting to settle out and the initial top comment quite often doesn't stay that way.

It's hard sometimes because say it's something that I wrote but someone else posted to HN, I've just had a lot of people's opinions foisted on me.

I'm relatively immune to a lot of things, but we're also entering a world where a lot of people can build and might not expect to have potentially millions of people critiquing their work to the level they do.


I think this is one reason people like asking LLMs things. They have many downsides, but they're never rude or belittling.

We are way past that point now. It's a common tendency around here, especially taking into account how often those type of posts are actually the ones on the top. Gladly we still have people like your parent to call them out immediately.

Yeah, but eventually the downvoting/community moderation will do its work: it just takes a few hours sometimes. But the original unkind remark has gone from top level comment to nowhere near the top of the discussion (at least I haven't managed to find it other than via my own profile because of all the newer and more upvoted discussion that's happened) fairly quickly.

That's just hn for you. Not that it's a good thing (as per me at least), but that's what hn is, no matter how much it (or few from here) tries to think/pretend otherwise.

Shitty comment?

From my point of view the Jedi are Evil


I tend to be amused that the complaints about what’s on the front page don’t seem to grasp the irony of complaining to the group of people that voted it there.

No. It's quality control. This is a classic clickbait formula headline with 0 backing. I just typed "list 30 papers to get me started in machine learning" into an llm and got 27/30 of these...

This page is an LLM prompt response as a list of jpegs with a fake title. You can probably just add "and prepare it as a webpage with image previews for each" ...

I think we can do better than someone shitposting a sentence into openclaw and getting it to the frontpage.

People on here are actually building 100 billion dollar companies, publishing in prestigious journals, maintaining transcontinental infrastructures with global reach... let's hear from them instead of a mac mini going burr for 15 seconds.


First year CD student excited to learn puts together a website, and more experienced guys makes a shitty comment that puts things into context. Then someone makes a funny comment mimicking its structure. Is that correct?

It actually got to the front page though? I think what's more ironic is that the top comment thread on this is devolving into a discussion about hacker news meta and nobody in the comments section has written even 1 line about what these papers are or the subject or how useful they/the website is. Yes that is correct.

First year CS student is already vibe coding something which lacks basic presentation skills.

If he was really excited he would have put an effort and he wouldn't clickbate submission title.

But alas here we are, perhaps we should give him particpation star for effort.


Many here mistake passive aggressiveness for civility. So does the rule enforcement.

100% correct (anyone on hn for longer than 3 months will recognize that this is exactly the culture here).

not shitty enough



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