Why is it so that every so often one of these feel-good LinkedIn-style posts make it to the front page? Is there so much demand for banality on this site? I come here to read good tech articles or articles that stimulate my curiosity and it is sad to see these articles upvoted to the top when so many other good articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest continue to languish.
Simplicity bias, kind of like "bikeshedding". A large number of people can read this quickly, agree with it, and upvote it. Whereas articles about optimising machine code for the Apple Silicon CPU, or "Risks to the Glen Canyon Dam" are a lot more niche.
Personally, I follow specific people who regularly submit interesting content, and pay less attention to the homepage.
In the true HN spirit, I have a little script goes through the Hacker News API and shows them as an RSS feed. But if you'd rather use something off-the-shelf there's https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=synergy20
Welcome. Don't worry too much, have fun, remove emotion out of the equation, be consistent, fire-n-forget. The side effect of it is then the Karma keep growing on its own. But don't worry too much about that - not worth it.
Mine was just about 10K+ before the Pandemic. Then, I found the fun part, the rhythm, and then it has grown since then.
I do that (maybe not the consistent part, I do go days without making any comments sometimes), I don't karma farm, or worry about it or anything. But it's impossible not to notice the number in the top right from time to time (also usually my clue to check for responses to my comments).
I just assumed it was on the higher end on this site (like top 10-15%), based on the several dozen other profiles I've looked at. Seems I might be further down than I assumed, is all.
I have become somewhat… jaded, in my view of the current tech scene.
I’m sure that some of it is just sour grapes, on my part, but that doesn’t make the problem any less real.
I don’t really feel like going through my posting history, but there’s been a number of times that I’ve been “OK, Boomer”ed, here (I suspect that you’d need to turn on I See Dead Posts to catch most).
I’ve learned to accept the SillyCon Valley ageism, but it still pisses me off, to see the awful results of disastrous decisions made by folks without experience. Many of these jackpots were entirely predictable, to anyone with scars.
If it were just the Principals, getting hurt, I wouldn’t mind so much, but the blast radius tends to include a lot of collateral damage.
Huh. I'm assuming that it's this reply that earned the thread a closure. As far as I know, it wasn't flagged (but I may not know that). It still has positive karma.
Was it because I mentioned a particular HN setting?
I would certainly appreciate knowing what I did to earn the Ire of The Gods.
I doubt it was mentioning ageism. We talk about that, all the time, and some folks get pretty insulting about it, without getting dinged.
I've absolutely no idea about the closure, et al. I also don't flag or downvote anything on HackerNews. But hey, between you and me, I love reading your comment. Thanks.
I think it's similar to a well shared meme, or a self help book. Sometimes something (simple/banal(!)) just encapsulates the way a lot of people are thinking or feeling but haven't managed to verbalise. You read it and think "huh, that's very true," come back to HN and vote it up. The fact other people are doing the same is a nice justification that you're not alone in feeling that way, particularly in the midst of a crowd of high achievers.
Indeed. I think it fulfills some sort of social need to read/hear back my own thinking in slightly different and often more coherent words. It gives me a feeling of being understood, which is of course sort of artificial when writer of the text is someone who doesn't even know who I am.
It feels sort of related to the technique therapists seem to use; based on patient's rambling stories, they summarize how they feel in much more succinct way than they themselves would have been able to, which makes them feel like they are finally being understood, which often results in tears.
If anything the original post looks like the very antithesis of a typical linkedin post which is overboard with enthusiasm and positivity (to the point of being nauseating) and devoid of even a hint of introspection or a reality check. Maybe it's just our linkedin networks and personalizations are very different... who knows?
I didn't upvote or submit this article, but my answer to your question is that this site serves a wide audience and not everyone shares your preferences.
When I hit that link half are flagged dead, I see one directly from LinkedIn, and most are not hard tech articles but rather something tech adjacent such as about soft skills or selling tech.
It's good advice, pointing out a very hard-to-grasp aspect of human nature.
Here's a question for you. Why, if /newest is meeting your needs, did you feel the need to make this comment, hoping to adjust HN's sorting behavior for the front page?
You, and everyone who upvoted this to make this the top comment on this post, are making the exact same mistake pointed out by the linked article.
I follow /best through RSS and I upvote every single post that I looked at the comments for. Even if I think it's dumb and disagree with it (like in this case), it made me interested in what other people think of it, so it provides value.
Why is this the top comment (at time of writing)? It makes no reference to the actual content, just complaining that the article was on the frontpage.
I personally enjoyed reading the sentiment of the article and don't mind it being on the frontpage. But I would never think of writing a comment complaining that the article wasn't on the frontpage.
Why should the frontpage content only make you happy? This made me happy, so I was glad it was on the frontpage.
I guess the comment could also be juxtaposition on the headline: stop acting like you're famous.
At first I thought it's generally good and can help with perfectionism and apathy, but the completely unnecessary plug of Grammarly put it in question. I'm on mobile but if there is any analytics tracking views (hard to say if it is server side) then surely the author gets paid
(For context, I was triggered since I know the likes of Grammarly, NordVPN and similar are absolute beasts in getting plugs from people with any sort of following in any niche)
HN is a comment site masquerading as a news site. A large percentage of commenters go directly to the comments without ever reading the article. They just want an excuse to spout their opinions.
And to read the opinions that other HNers spout. The comments are often better than the articles. Also, I know I'll be able to read them without fending off popups and dark patterns.
We can debate if comments are more informative than articles and sometimes they are. Many times they are not, especially if you happen to be a SME.
Sometimes I wonder why I continue to read reddit, the signal/noise raise is very low, but when you get that 1 informative or insightful comments out of a sea of garbage, it keeps you going for awhile.
Same here. The top comment we're discussing is a good example of comments I really dislike :/ people think that only things they find interesting should be upvoted by everyone else :D that kind of thinking, which is very common in HN comments, shows just how much one can lack understanding of others, their motivations, how people's tastes/objectives/world views can be completely and utterly different than their own.
I agree with the top comment but it's not for lack of understanding but for a lamentation of how this place is similar to any other social network like internet place overwhelmed with solipsistic banality.
Just look at how many comments around the site are personal anecdotes tangentially related to whatever the post is.
> The top comment we're discussing is a good example of comments I really dislike :/
As a revealed preference, no, you don't. It's trivially easy to collapse a comment you genuinely don't like, which would mean you wouldn't be posting in its replies more than halfway down.
Funny you say that. I do often go to the comments because some of the people commenting here on HN are famous. If not famous they are more involved in IT or other industries at a high level.
I know I'm a nobody but it's interesting to read comments some are better than the linked articles.
As an old Slashdot user with a low user ID, I disagree. Not RTFA was definitely scorned as it was on the Usenet. But you had limited ability to vote people down, so perhaps it appeared more socially acceptable.
There's always been a place for the occasional self-help or inspirational article on HN. I think there's probably a bit less of it than there used to be.
If you see good articles on /newest that are languishing, please upvote them!
...and if there's a really good one that hasn't had attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can consider putting it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). Especially if it's not an article you have any personal connection to—we'll appreciate the nomination a lot more if it's motivated by curiosity rather than self-promotion.
I think the tech industry has also changed over time. I joined just as the iPhone and thus smartphone apps became a thing, but we just haven’t seen shakeups like social media, cloud computing, web frameworks, etc recently.
Crypto is effectively dead, LLM’s ended up mostly hype with limited utility, so what’s there to talk about? Random interesting side projects, retro technology, random science stuff, a bit of news, etc and that’s what HN front page looks like.
> If ever you make a mistake, never, ever write it up.
Sure you can write it up! But post it to maybe, Reddit?
The HN audience expects certain standard of quality and insight in the article if the article is on the front page.
Here the community has voted that this article does not meet the bar. I can't speak for others but for me this article is too obvious and uninteresting.
Instead of complaining about something that didn't happen here (nobody said the OP was stupid), maybe learn from the community feedback and refrain from posting articles that don't meet the community expectations?
> The HN audience expects certain standard of quality and insight in the article if the article is on the front page.
It was on the front page ... it hit the top spot. Various people in the community clearly did think it met the bar.
> ... nobody said the OP was stupid ...
Reading between the lines, several people effectively said exactly that.
I know, I'm in "Old man yells at cloud" territory here, but I was kinda hoping people would find a more positive way of interpreting the situation, rather than "Can't the author just RTFM?!?" types of responses.
My agèd and fading memory of what HN was like when I first joined suggests that people used to be more interested in being constructive and learning from other people's mistakes, even the mistakes that, when they didn't make them, seemed obvious in retrospect. Perhaps especially those ones.
Since this didn't meet your bar, since it's all too obvious for you, I guess there's very little for you to learn. I'm sorry you (and others) felt you had to dump on it, instead of leaving it for people who can still learn from things as "obvious" as this. After all, the votes that got it to the front page show that not everyone knows as much as you do.
> It was on the front page ... it hit the top spot. Various people in the community clearly did think it met the bar.
It was on the front page. It hit the top spot. Then it got flagged. Many people in the community clearly did think it was clickbait and did not meet the bar!
Yeah, as I say, people are a lot less tolerant now about people sharing simple mistakes they make than they were when I first started posting here. People used to grimace in sympathy, acknowledge that they've also made simple mistakes, and move on.
Now things like that get flagged, even though there's clearly a sizeable proportion of people who do still find it useful[0].
The demographics have changed[1].
So I'll remember, on your advice, that if ever I write up any simple mistakes I make, I won't post them here.
[0] FWIW, I think flags required to kill something is far fewer than votes required to get to the front page. So even if a vast majority of people think something is interesting, a far smaller collection of people can get it killed.
[1] Or my memory is faulty. I've been here 15 years now ... maybe it was always like this.
If you've used a command for the past 10[0] years, and it's always worked, and you go to use it again, and you're using it in a similar way to how you always have, do you read the man page?
No, of course you don't. You expect things to behave the way they always have.
Then when something goes wrong you don't immediately suspect the command you've successfully been using for the past 10 years and read the man page for all the commands you've been using for the past 10[1] years.
"If you've used a command for the past 10[0] years, and it's always worked, and you go to use it again, and you're using it in a similar way to how you always have, do you read the man page?"
I'm trying to find where the cut-off point might be.
Do you read the man page every time you use "ls"?
Do you read the man page every time you invoke the compiler for your favourite language?
If you use someone else's machine, do you read the man page for every command you type? The distro could be different, so you can't be sure it will be the same.
I suspect the answer here in each case is "no", so I'm curious as to where you draw the line. If you used a command yesterday, and the day before and the day before that, do you read the man page today?
Again, I suspect the answer is "no", but again, I'm curious as to where that line really is.
> If you’re already trusting it for your IP address, you might as well trust it with the current UTC time
I don't follow! How does trusting DHCP with IP address automatically mean I should trust it with the current UTC time?
Time requires higher degree of trust than IP.
I may not care what my IP address looks like but I might care a lot about what the current UTC time is and I might want this to come from a more trustworthy device.
You don't need to trust the dhcp time. But it would be useful for bootstrapping, especially devices without rtc. This does not really apply to your average PC which probably already has good guess on current time, those can simply just ignore the dhcp provided value.
The DHCP server provided value can not be much worse than 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z default value if you don't have any other data. And if you have some other data, e.g. ext4 superblock timestamps, you can pretty trivially protect against DHCP providing time from the past (i.e. use the maximum of different sources).
Finally, you can restrict the use of the dhcp provided time to the initial bootstrapping process only; it's not necessary to use it for system-wide clock
DHCP servers can command your dns config and hostname too. It's not a total mitm story since the certs are still on the machine itself but it's definitely more than just a local IP address.
To offer an example, if an attacker can manipulate the time then they can make the target accept expired or revoked cryptographic certificates, potentially enabling impersonation or man-in-the-middle attacks.
In contrast, a different IP than expected isn't such a big deal... Although it might break the collaboration of two computers as crude denial of service
> that is worth the complexity tradeoff of people often using it subtly wrong?
I don't think that makes the complexity tradeoff worth it. This is the kind of tradeoff that makes the language implementation, reference and semantics more and more complex. Unfortunately Python has a lot of such complexities already. We don't need more of it. Such complexity hurts the creation of completing implementations.
IMHO programming language specifications and implementations should be simple and consistent so that competing implementations can be developed easily.
> people often using it subtly wrong?
I think that... you know... before writing serious software, these people need to roll up their sleeves and just learn the damn language. Just learn what references are and how they work in Python. It's not that hard. It is most definitely easier than adding a sphagetti monster to the compiler make it bend to the will of programmers who can't be bothered to read the tutorial. I mean this gotcha about references is taught in the 4th chapter of the tutorial. Can't developers even bother to RTFM these days before developing serious software with a programming language?
> these people need to roll up their sleeves and just learn the damn language
You really have no choice but to do that. But the critique here is that some languages make this hard. And some languages, like Python, appear deceptively simple and consistent, when they are anything but. And as I pointed out, these decisions were not really required or designed to solve certain problems. They just kind of came about in Python's development, one historically and intentionally ignorant of pre-existing languages and their good ideas.
When everybody just says "learn the language" or "there's list comprehensions" or "there's for loops", then why does the [...]*n syntax exist? What problems is it solving that require the confusion that it generates?
> What problems is it solving that require the confusion that it generates?
I think I answered that already. It keeps the language spec consistent and simpler.
Imagine the complexity you have to add to the language spec to say that when we write [] we deal with the reference to this list except in the multiplication syntax a = [[]] * 5 where the inner [] is not a reference to the list but the list value! Such special case will make the language both inconsistent and harder to understand for experienced programmers.
Ah! Misunderstood your original comment. My apologies! Yes, I am with you when you question the usefulness of the multiplication syntax.
I prefer simplicity and consistency in a programming language grammar, syntax and semantics as I advocated above. So yes I'd be happy to lose that multiplication syntax. It is not worth it.
"less than 2 drinks a day" would be called "moderate drinking" in my culture. I mean if someone is having a drink or two everyday that is moderate drinking already.
Light drinking for us would be like 3 drinks in a week! 4 drinks/week or more gets us into the moderate drinking territory.
To be fair, "less than 2 drinks a day" covers any range below the upper limit of 2 a day, and hence also includes what you consider light drinking in your culture.
I suppose that the root of the matter is whether or not the range '>0 to <2 drinks a day' on average is too broad and may be hiding a significant difference of outcomes between the top of the range at 2 a day and the (non-abstinents) at the bottom who drink an average of, say, 2 drinks a week.
And that's not even going into regularity. I'm sure that 2 drinks a day on the regular has different health impacts and social implications than 14 drinks a night only on Fridays.
> Of course they phrased it that way on purpose because implying causality makes their results sound way more important than they are.
How do you know that? I am at a loss to understand how someone on HN can read one sentence and begin drawing conclusions about what other ulterior motives they had while writing the sentence?
Maybe that sentence means exactly what it says and nothing more which is Z is a function of X and Y? Why perform psychoanalysis on that sentence? And if you have to perform psychoanalysis of that sentence, at least substantiate your conclusion by telling us what process you followed to rule out about a 100 other possible ulterior motives and conclude that "makes their results sound way more important than they are" is most definitely the ulterior motive they had?
> Why should somebody try to convince you in either direction?
Because we are on a tech website and as good samaritans we want to help each other out by sharing the information, knowledge, projects, tools or recommendations we have?
